


Our Lady Of The Underground

by TheseusInTheMaze



Series: Dead Gods [1]
Category: Game Grumps
Genre: Angel Wings, Angels, Body Horror, Conflict, Death, Divinity, Extra Limbs, F/F, Gods, Grief, Hades/Persephone Parallel, Kissing, Mental Transformation, Transformation, post-apocalyptic setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 14:30:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15487917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheseusInTheMaze/pseuds/TheseusInTheMaze
Summary: A long time ago, something happened. Something big, something complicated. And now, gods roam the world. One day, Suzy meets one.





	Our Lady Of The Underground

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, onewarmline, for your wonderful beta-ing! 
> 
> The Bride of the World comes from _The Shootout at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World_ by Cat Valente. 
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the musical, Hadestown. 
> 
> The ever lovely youtube_lover123 created an excellent mix for this fic - https://open.spotify.com/user/youtube_lover123/playlist/1lQ3mVwHEdf60wJo01DN4W?si=v7BUdw7AT5iHKFuUUEMAHw

There were things that happened a long time ago. They were no doubt exciting and terrifying to those who were part of it, but it had been long enough that the dead were forgotten, but for those whose job it was to keep track.

Suzy didn’t know much about it; it was before her time. 

It was all before her time.

There weren’t people around the way there used to be these days. Suzy only ever saw her family, or the occasional traveling peddler. They had neighbors, but seeing them was pretty rare, with one thing and another.

Apparently, in the old days, there wasn’t quite so much… something in the air.

It wasn’t magic, exactly.

Something like divinity. 

Something like creation. 

There weren’t enough people in the world anymore, so some of them became gods. 

There wasn’t really… logic to it, but these types of things didn’t have much, did they?

Suzy’s mom said that they had, once upon a time. These days, things didn’t always do what they were supposed to. 

Sometimes the tomatoes in her mother’s garden turned red and fat, and were harvested. Sometimes the tomatoes grew little antlers and dueled each other, trying to gash anyone in the ankles when they opened the garden gate. 

That was the way the world worked. Suzy had grown up in it, so what else was she going to expect? 

Suzy lived in a big family, and it was… well, it was a good family. 

She was the baby, even though she and Jean were twins, and everyone expected them to do something divine.

Twins were lucky that way – or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it. 

Suzy… kept out of trouble.

To the best of her ability.

She was beautiful and she knew she was, because she was untouched by magic and the other poisons that used to leak into the air and the water, although it had been years since that kind of trouble reared itself up.

Suzy’s life was… as close to idyllic as it could get, when the world had moved on to the degree that it had.

She wished, sometimes, that they wouldn’t talk about it, how the world had moved on.

Her grandparents remembered when cars had been alive, and not just the rusted metal skeletons covered in greenery. Suzy couldn’t imagine them moving, any more than she could imagine her own house standing up and walking away.

Suzy’s life was simple, almost boring, although everyone was watching her and her sister for signs of the divine.

When Suzy was seven, a friend of hers had begun to glow and levitate, emitting rays of divinity like bolts of lightning, and then she’d become an angel.

Suzy didn’t want to be an angel. Being an angel meant growing new eyes, new arms, growing wings.

Apparently, there used to be more disparity between the gods. It was all a hodgepodge these days; people had the one pantheon or the other, or a little of everything.

It didn't matter where your family was from, or what gods you grew up knowing – sometimes you just got chosen.

Nobody in Suzy's area had changed like that since she was about ten, and one of the neighbor kids had just... manifested as a god of thunder. 

One minute they were playing in the dust together, drawing weird little pictures. The next, he was floating above the ground, as lightning sheeted off of him like water.

Suzy had nearly been struck – a streak of it passed by her, turning a patch of her hair white, and that had been her only relation to divinity.

So far.

Sometimes, she heard the angels going about their business, or some god or another prowling around outside at night. 

But she didn't meddle in that.

She kept on with her life, as best she could.

You didn't want to mess with any of that. You kept your head down, and you did what you needed to do to keep going. 

So she was utterly unprepared the day she met the Lady of the Underworld.

* * * 

Suzy went out to look for dead things.

It wasn't to look for food - she didn't need to worry about food, not really. The family was good for the winter, what with one thing and another.

But she liked dead things, bones and feathers, and she knew all the good spots to find them.

Dead things were simpler. A bone was a bone, a feather was a feather.

There was a pigeon nest nearby, and one of the pigeons had died. Suzy had put it by an ant's nest, and now she was hoping she'd have a skeleton. Hopefully, no god would see it as some kind of offering – that kind of thing happened sometimes, and you didn't want to get the attention of gods like that.

When she came to the old growth forest and looked up, she saw a woman sitting on the branches of the tree.

Suzy could tell immediately that she was in the presence of a god.

She wouldn't have been able to put her finger on why she could tell - it was something about what the air did around gods, something about the way things smelled.

The woman had hair that kept changing color. That could have been godhood, but then again, it could have just been weird magic.

Weird magic does a lot of strange things to people.

Suzy stayed put, and she watched.

The woman was talking quietly to the birds. Suzy didn't understand what the woman was saying, but she could faintly hear the warbling - tones going up and down like singing. 

The woman was wearing a long black dress, and it was inscribed with sigils. There was a broad brimmed hat dangling from a branch as well, and the woman wasn't wearing any shoes.

The callouses on the bottoms of her feet were very thick, which struck Suzy as odd. Why would a god have calloused feet? Wouldn't they be able to just... fly?

Or was this woman not that kind of god?

"You know I can see you, right?"

The woman's voice was... pleasant. It was nasal, and it had an accent that Suzy couldn't place.

It was a lot different from the voices that Suzy was used to, at any rate, and it was different from the voice that she used with the pigeons.

"I'm sorry," Suzy said, and she looked up at the god. "Can I... help you?"

Suzy had never been taught how to interact with the divine. 

... in retrospect, maybe this was an oversight. 

"No, I'm fine," said the woman. "Although I wouldn't mind some company, if you're offering it."

Was Suzy offering it?

You weren't supposed to disobey a god... but you also weren't supposed to be around them. 

Gods didn't usually want to be around humans, either. It reminded them of who they used to be, of what being human was, and what they had become. 

Suzy had imagined it a bit like puberty - she'd gotten her period, and not long afterwards, the things that had seemed like the height of entertainment lost a lot of its luster.

But the woman was staring down at Suzy with bright green eyes, and her expression was mild. 

"If you'd like my time as an offering," Suzy said, and okay, she was hedging her bets, but what else was she supposed to do? 

"I'm not asking for an offering," said the woman. "Just your company."

Didn't gods keep company with other gods? Or were they like cats?

Some cats liked the company of other cats. Some didn't. 

Then again, cats acted as if they were gods – although there wasn’t one way that all gods acted.

Suzy was panicking. She could feel it, like a ball of hot metal right under her collarbone, but it was happening a long way away. It was almost like she was floating up above her body, until she was face to face with the god. 

But that was nonsense, because Suzy was just standing there, looking up at her.

“What’s your name?”

“Mort,” Suzy said, which wasn’t true in the slightest, but she wasn’t born yesterday. You didn’t give anything that divine any of your names, from your baby name to the name given to you by your lover.

Names had power, and that wasn’t something you shared. 

The woman raised an eyebrow. 

“Really?” 

“Really.” 

“Are you making a pun?”

Suzy paused. “What do you mean?”

“A play on words,” said the god, and some kind of look passed across her face.

“I know what a pun is,” said Suzy, and she frowned at the god, which was probably a bad idea.

“Did you not get the pun?” The god put down one of the pigeons. 

Why had the pigeon let her hold it? Was it a god thing?

Magic pigeon-carrying gods?

… well, when you got right down to it, what the fuck did Suzy know? Nobody talked about gods, except that you needed to ignore them or placate them as much as you could.

"Not really, no," said Suzy, and she shoved her hands into her pockets.

Was she supposed to be more deferential, or less? 

"Well, that's a relief," said the god, and then she grabbed her hat, and jumped down off of the tree to land on the ground next to Suzy.

Suzy's knees ached just watching her do that - did gods not have joints to worry about jostling?

"So, Mort," said the god, "are you from around here?"

"I live nearby," said Suzy. Like fuck she was going to tell a god where she really lived.

"Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

The god was shorter than Suzy, and that was a weird thing to think about.

Gods were usually... big, in personality if not in size. 

It was one of those things that was hard to explain, but gods just took up more space.

That was one theory as to why they showed up in the first place. There was too much space on the earth now, with so many people gone. Nature abhors a vacuum, and instead of filling it with dimetrodons and giant ground sloths, it put gods in.

That made sense, as much as any theory did.

This god, though... she was just... here.

Maybe she wasn't a god at all.

But then Suzy looked into her face, and... no. This woman was definitely a god.

"Mort?"

Suzy snapped out of her daze and realized that she'd been staring at the god's shifting hair, which went from pink to purple to a deep grey. 

"Sorry," said Suzy. "What?"

"Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"I look at everyone like that," Suzy said.

"I can tell you're lying, you know," the god said.

"My mother says the same thing," Suzy replied. "Doesn't make it real." 

Wow, was she was sassing a god?

She was going to be smited.

... smote? Smitten?

Instead, the god laughed. It was a burst of ugly, honking laughter, and that was unusual. 

Gods could be whatever they wanted to be, right? So why keep an ugly laugh?

Suzy smiled back, her expression nervous. How could she change this? 

... what was "this”?

Was she always this aware of her thoughts, or was she just focusing on them, instead of the smell of divinity shrouding the woman in front of her?

"My mother told me the same thing," said the god, and she smiled.

Her teeth were made of some kind of shiny, silvery metal. It didn't look like silver. 

It was very bright.

Suzy looked down, lacking anything else to do, and then she saw the ground withering under the god's feet.

The dead leaves were rotting, turning into dirt. The place where the god had been sitting on the tree was also dead - it looked old and weathered, like some kind of disease. 

Suzy tried not to stare. 

"I don't come out that often," said the god. "I miss the sun, sometimes."

"Do you?"

"Yeah," said the god, and she turned her head back, her hat falling off of her head, her face presented to the sun.

She was smiling up at the sun, and the light caught her teeth. The reflection caught the bright light of the sun, and got Suzy right in the face.

The light that reflected wasn't just bright, it was...

It was like the time Suzy's sister had tossed her one of the giant sacks of flour. The wind was knocked out of her, and suddenly she was flat on her back, panting. 

Everything smelled like divinity and she couldn't see anything, and when she closed her eyes, she saw the light dancing.

She laid there like that on the leaf litter, and then there was a hand on her forehead, brushing her hair back, tucking the blond piece behind her ear.

She could always tell with that piece of hair - it always felt a little different after its brush with magic. A little more connected to her _self_ , versus her body.

What did _that_ mean? she wondered, and then she passed out.

* * * 

Suzy woke up, her vision spotty, still in the forest.

She sat up, and she rubbed her eyes, to find everything moving towards dusk. She squinted, trying to get her eyesight adjusted, and then she frowned. 

The ground was darker in a spot next to her. The soil was richer, as if it had been mulched.

As Suzy's vision slowly came back, she realized that she was looking at the shape of someone sitting cross legged. 

In mulch.

The god must have sat next to her.

Hopefully the god wasn’t taking an interest in her. Gods usually left people alone; too painful to remember mortality or something like that. 

But you never knew.

Suzy slowly made her way towards home. It wasn’t until her sister asked after the pigeon bones that she realized that she’d completely forgotten about that. 

She’d have to go back for them the next day. 

* * * 

The tree was still god-touched the next day, and the dark, mulched spots where the god had rested were already starting to grow small shoots.

The pigeon skeleton was still there as well, untouched. 

When Suzy looked in on the nest, the birds were dead, and the tree was growing a new branch through the nest.

Gods were complicated, and they brought too much strangeness into your life.

She took the dead pigeons with her. The skeletons were still intact, as though the birds died of old age over the course of a day. She articulated them anyway, and kept them in the window of her room.

Her sister complained, but it was Suzy’s window. 

* * *

Suzy didn’t talk about the things she saw out of the corner of her eye - she was already a little bit god touched, with that streak in her hair.

She tried to ignore it. 

She saw the ghosts of birds, just out of focus. 

Almost out of the corner of her mind, come to think of it. 

She could feel the rational bits of her brain shivering away from them, and she would rub her eyes and change the subject in her mind, very loudly. 

A lot of dealing with gods seemed to be about changing the subject. 

Why didn't anyone ever talk about that?

Was there a way to make this stuff more... well, workable?

None of this was workable.

Suzy was getting mad. Legitimately mad, as the days went on, and the little ghosts of birds peeped and flapped on the edges of her mind, the corners of her eyes.

She fumed through her chores, ground her teeth through dinner with her family, and generally hated everything.

Her siblings took one look at her face and avoided her. 

Her parents shrugged their shoulders and went on with their lives - they both made polite inquiries, but what was she going to say to them?

Would she tell them that she met a god and saw the ghosts of birds?

At least her eyes didn't look different. She glanced at herself in the mirror a few times to be sure, but nothing had changed.

She was very lucky, all things considered. They lived in a settlement, and there were people around them (for a given value of “around”). You heard horror stories about what happened with people left alone for too long. There were bits of the area that were too god touched to ever grow anything normal, and with nobody around… 

They were pretty close to the nearest neighbors, about an hour walking in the woods provided everything went the way it was supposed to.

It mostly went the way it was supposed to.

But Suzy didn't want people right now.

She wanted to be _away_ from people.

Why did she want to be alone?

Fucked if she knew. 

She sighed, and she shoved her hands into the pockets of her pants, her older brother's pants she'd patched and hemmed to the point that they were hers, making her way through the forest.

She had salt and bread in her pockets, and she was wearing a token of iron. Nobody knew if they did anything against gods, but you had to try. 

She realized too late that she was making her way towards the god-touched tree. How could she not?

There was a small bush growing in the place where the god had sat. The berries dangling off of them clinked like Christmas ornaments, knocking together. Suzy ran her fingers along the needles and found that it felt ceramic. 

The branches growing out of the old pigeon's nest had grown feathers as well, sprouting like pine needles.

"This is all too weird," Suzy said out loud.

"You get used to it," said a voice behind her, and Suzy spun around to see its source.

The god with green eyes and every changing hair was wearing a pair of shorts and the remains of a t-shirt, printed with the moon upside down. There were flowers in her hair that sparkled in the light, and it took a moment before Suzy realized that they were made of the thinnest metal she'd ever seen.

Almost like the old soda cans that she still tripped over sometimes, but it looked fancier than that. 

"Get used to what?” Suzy asked.

There were ghosts of birds all around the god - preening her hair, snuggling into her face. "Stuff just... happening," she said. 

She looked almost rueful. Her feet were bare, like Suzy's, but there was mulch between her toes instead of grass. 

"Oh," said Suzy. 

She kind of wanted to kick the god in the shins. That was probably unfair, but nothing to do with gods was ever fair. Not even for them.

"I didn't mean to do that," the god said, indicating the tree, with its spots of age and its spots of new greenery. 

"No?"

"Or that," the god said, and she indicated the branch with the feathers.

"Are they real?"

"Hm?"

"The birds," said Suzy. 

The god frowned. "What birds?"

"You know. The birds around you." Suzy made a vague hand motion, at the birds all around the god.

She could even recognize the individual pigeons - one of them had a crooked wing, and the other had a splash of white across its back, like someone had dumped paint on it. They were still translucent, but clearly themselves.

"I have a lot of ghosts around me," said the god, and her expression went a little sad. "Although the ghosts of birds are lucky, did you know that? One of them defeated a blight, with the help of a hedgehog."

Suzy raised an eyebrow. 

"Before your time, I suspect," said the god. "What brought you back, Mort? I thought you guys were afraid of me."

"I mean, not you," said Suzy, which was pretty close to true.

"You're not afraid of me?"

"I’m not afraid of you for... you know, being you."

Suzy was careful to avoid the god's gaze, or her teeth. 

The ghosts of the birds were less wrong when they were settled around the god like that. Maybe all of that unreality pressed together evened out.

Or maybe she was thinking too deeply into it. 

She was… still angry.

She couldn’t remember ever being this angry, and she didn’t even know _why_.

Maybe it was just all that time spent flinching away from the ghosts of birds.

“What are humans afraid of?” The god sounded genuinely interested, which was making this that much weirder.

How was Suzy even supposed to answer that?

“A lot of things,” she said, and maybe that was rude, but she was officially out of patience. She was biting her tongue to keep from saying anything she might regret, but oh, it was hard. 

“Are you lonely?”

That wasn’t what Suzy had expected, and she looked up, straight into the god’s eyes.

They were deep, and the same pale green as looking up at the sun through the canopy of a tree.

It was… it was old, but it also _wasn’t_ , and how could divinity be young like this?

It hit Suzy like a kick in the gut. The magic of it seemed to be seeping into her very pores, and she shuddered, and sat down on the ground.

“Are you… okay?” The god was standing close enough that Suzy could smell her, faintly. She smelled like things baking, like good soil, with a faint sour smell on the back end.

She smelled a little bit like hot metal in the sun.

“I’m fine,” Suzy said.

“Can I help?”

“No,” Suzy said, her voice thick. Her eyes were on the ground, and she was looking at the god’s feet.

There was a small beetle crawling towards the god’s foot, and Suzy’s heart stopped, when it touched the god’s skin.

“Mort,” said the god, as the little beetle died.

It withered, and then it was another speck of dirt on the god’s muddy feet.

Suzy kept her eyes down. “What?”

“You’re obviously not fine, if you’re so upset,” said the god, and she sounded… anxious?

It was making Suzy mad, like everything else made her mad, and she clenched her fists. She stared right into the god’s eyes, consequences be damned..

Could you get drunk on rage?

“You can’t fix it,” Suzy said, and wow, she _was_ angry.

“I could,” said the god, “if you told me what was wrong?”

The god’s nose was upturned, and her face was narrow, her eyes a bright, bright green.

“You just… change things,” Suzy said, and she was tearing up. 

Was she having strong emotions? Was she just reacting to being so close to so much divinity?

… was the _divinity_ making her angry?

The god’s face was genuinely sad. There were tears dripping down her face, tears made of mercury, and they were landing on the ground, and long leafy plants were growing from it. They sprouted purple flowers even as Suzy watched.

The flowers looked like nothing so much as paintbrushes tipped in purple. They didn’t belong in this kind of climate – hell, they didn’t even seem to belong to this _world_. 

“I don’t do it on purpose,” the god said. “It’s why I haven’t been up in so long. Things are pretty much settled, y’know? So I thought I’d come up, see the… see the sights.”

“Up?” Suzy asked.

The god was crying now, really crying, and more prickly, strange plants were growing around her bare feet, wherever her tears landed. 

The god’s tears which didn’t look like tears, but like… mercury, maybe?

But how were things growing from it?

“I’ve… I’ve got a lot of names,” said the god. “One of them is the Lady of the Underground.”

“Oh,” said Suzy. That didn’t mean anything to her. Apparently, in the old days, people told stories about gods and heroes, but these days.… 

You didn’t want gods around, and what was a hero, if not a person who had been addled by a god?

“I’m in charge of those who are gone,” said the god. She sat down on the ground and another plant was growing, right by her foot. It was the opposite of that desert plant, if you could have plant “opposites” – it looked like it belong somewhere with snow.

Suzy had never actually seen snow, but she’d seen videos of it.

“So,” said the Lady of the Underground, “since I’ve shared mine, do you want to try telling me your name again?”

Suzy sat down, out of reach of the god, because she might have been a bit… out of it, but she wasn’t stupid.

“I’m Mort,” Suzy repeated. 

“Your name is literally death,” the Lady of the Underground said, and her tone was so flat that you could have played marbles on it. 

“It is,” said Suzy. “I had morbid parents.”

What did ‘those who are gone’ mean, anyway?

“I guess I can’t fault you that,” said the god, and she was wrapping her arms around her legs, resting her chin on her knees. “I didn’t like my name much.”

Suzy raised an eyebrow. 

“I had a different name back then,” said the Lady. “I lost it along time ago. And anyway, it isn’t who I am.”

Suzy didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what happened when you became a god. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to.

The plant by the god’s foot was grown now, and it was big. The leaves looked sharp, and there were red berries. 

“Why are you here?”

Wow. Suzy was losing her manners.

“I missed the sun,” said the god. “It’s been a while, like I said.”

There were more ghost birds about. Most of them were pigeons. 

“I could fix your eyes, if you’d like,” the god said, as if she could read Suzy’s mind. “At least I think I can. I haven’t… been around a person like you in a long time.”

“What does that mean, like me?”

“Breathing, mainly,” said the god, and her expression could be read sardonic.

“You’re around a lot of corpses?”

“They’re not corpses when they come to me,” said the Lady. 

“Ghosts?”

“Not… exactly,” said the Lady. She shrugged, leaning back, her hands behind her head. Her arms and hands were tattooed, down to her fingers. They looked like mystic runes, and there were birds - a trio of crows wandered down one arm, moving across the god’s flesh like it was water.

There was a lady, wreathed in color. Suzy didn’t recognize her.

“Why do you keep coming _here_?”

“You’re the first living human being I’ve talked to in… a very long time,” said the Lady, and she tilted her head back.

It was odd. The god didn’t carry some kind of ethereal, otherworldly beauty.

She looked like a woman.

A not-human woman, admittedly, but the divinity clinging to her didn’t make her supernaturally beautiful.

Sometimes she looked almost human, until she’d turn her head, and then you’d catch a glimpse of her teeth, or the tattoos moving on her skin.

“So you come back here to… what? See me again?”

“Something like that,” said the Lady, and she grinned crooked.

There was the ghost of a bird on the god’s shoulder, trying to preen her hair. Its beak kept passing through the god’s hair. 

“Why?” Suzy asked.

“You’re not afraid of me,” replied the Lady. “Although you guys don’t worship like you used to, either.”

“It’s complicated,” said Suzy, because it was.

How could she explain the antagonism brought on by a loved one changing, or being struck by lightning, or just gaining all that power?

To be antagonistic to the gods made life simpler. 

“It is, yeah,” the Lady agreed, and she stretched again, her skin moved over her bones, and Suzy knew those bones were made of metal.

How did she know that?

… she just knew it.

She could see the shifting of the god’s skin, and that… that was uncomfortable in ways that she didn’t want to think about much. 

“What, that we don’t worship you anymore?”

One of the ghost birds was sidling towards Suzy. She was resolutely ignoring it, because she knew not to interact with that kind of thing.

If you left weird shit alone, sometimes it left you alone.

“I wasn’t always like this,” said the god, and she indicated herself. 

The ghost bird was trying to climb up Suzy’s leg. Suzy couldn’t feel it; the bird just walked through her, but it was… determinedly trying.

“No?”

This was polite conversation with a god, then.

Suzy should have been running away as fast as she could, but… 

But you never ran from anything immortal. It only attracts attention, as her father’s book had warned her. 

"I remember what things were like... you know, before," said the Lady, wistfully.

"Yeah?"

That was, admittedly, something that Suzy as curious about. The world had changed, she knew that. People talked about things, but a lot of them didn't make sense.

There hadn’t been gods, the way there were now. 

Or at least... maybe there had been, but people hadn't had to deal with them, the same way?

Suzy's grandparents had always been weird about the fact that people didn't like gods much. A lot of the people who still thought of gods as some wonderful rarity were dead now, either from old age, or from doing something stupid.

"They were different," the god said, with an air of finality.

Another fragment of a different book sprang into her head - _the world has moved on._

Of course it had

Although "moving on" implied that it was... going somewhere.

It didn't seem to be going anywhere yet.

Suzy sighed, and she leaned back.

The Lady was looking at her, with an expression that was almost thoughtful. The ghost of the pigeon was preening her hair now, and its beak wasn't phasing through her. It was slightly eerie, especially with the sky going just a little bit dark.

Was it going to rain?

Suzy looked up, and saw the moon out in the daytime.

She frowned, trying not to roll her eyes.

Gods

The Lady almost smiled. "The Bride of the World must be entertaining visitors.” 

"What?"

"It's a long story," said the god, and she made a vague hand motion. "Don't worry about it."

Suzy frowned harder.

As if she'd let some god tell her how to think. If she wanted to worry about it, she would worry about it.

"I live underground," said the god. "Usually."

"Why?"

... where had that come from?

Why was Suzy asking?

Why was she having this ridiculous conversation in the first place? 

Because….

Because she didn't want to admit that some small part of her wanted to die, every time she walked back into her house to see the same faces, not knowing what she was going to do with her future.

That was one of the reasons people hated gods so much - gods made people want _more_. 

More what?

Just… more.

How dare this god come around, telling Suzy about how things once were?

"Your mind is racing," the Lady said, and her voice was quiet.

Suzy made eye contact with the god, almost without thinking, and it was like being caught in a trap.

She couldn't move.

She was aware of her own breathing, aware of her heart in her ears, aware of everything all over her. 

Every inch of her skin was alive with nerves, with little hair follicles standing on end.

"I'm lonely," said the god, and it was a very old voice all of a sudden. It rattled Suzy's very bones. 

"We're all lonely," Suzy snapped back. More of that rage was building in her, the kind that tried to climb out of her throat and skitter down the road.

"Are you?"

"When your kind come around…." Suzy was looking into the god's eyes, and her eyes were wet and overflowing. 

She was crying, and... she was….

She wanted her dead animals that she'd sewn back together so carefully.

She wanted her family, even as they made her crazy.

She wanted not to be by herself with the Lady of the Underground.

What would she be the god _of_?

Some gods weren't gods of anything - some gods were just gods, spreading their divinity like radiation, infecting anyone within range.

"What about us?"

"People get lonely," said Suzy, "and you're kind of a person." Her lower lip was trembling, and she was mesmerized by those green eyes, just holding her in place.

"Kind of a person?" The god looked amused, and she broke the eye contact.

Suzy gasped, blinking down at the ground in front of her.

The ghost birds looked more solid, although they were still clearly ghosts. 

Suzy didn't know how she knew. It was... one of those things.

"Well," said Suzy, and she was grasping at straws, "one of the things that makes a person a person is that they can die."

The god's expression…. 

Suzy didn't understand it, but there was a pit of cold terror in the center of her stomach, like the stone of an apricot. 

"Gods can die," she said. 

"Can they?"

"It takes a lot longer, and it takes…." The Lady sighed, her expression almost... poignant. "It's complicated."

Of course it was.

"I miss the old world," said the god, "but there are definitely parts of this one that I like a lot better."

"Like what?"

"We didn't have the moon in the daytime back then," said the god. "Not like this."

Suzy frowned. You weren't supposed to enjoy the supernatural. You weren't supposed to _get_ anything from all of the strangeness, because it might bring around the wrong type of thing.

The type of thing nobody needed.

"We didn't see much in the way of stars back then, either," said the god.

"No?" 

"Well," said the god. "we didn't have the same stars we have now, but we also didn't really see the stars."

Suzy didn't say anything.

"The world was dying," the god said. "We all knew it."

Suzy stayed silent, as her heart beat in her ears. She'd been curious, but... had she wanted to know this badly?

“And we… well, it was more, in those days. These days, it’s simpler, I guess.”

“Where were the gods, then?”

“We didn’t have them.”

“But… how did you not have them?”

“We just… didn’t,” said the Lady, patiently.

“But how did you know about shit like–”

… she shouldn’t have sworn in front of a god. 

Oops.

“We had a lot of… conflicting opinions,” said the god. “It was a more complicated then.”

“It seems like everything was.”

“Everything is complicated when you’re living it,” said the god. 

Suzy couldn’t really argue with that. She lay back, even though each of her instincts was screaming at her not to do so, but she was comfortable.

She was comfortable in the presence of a god, even if she was still angry.

What was she mad at?

Who even knew?

“I missed green,” the god said.

“There isn’t any where you are?” Suzy asked.

“Not this kind,” said the god. “There’s some green, but it’s not… like, green-green. It’s not living.”

“What isn’t a living green?”

“Green glass. Emeralds.”

Suzy perked up at that. “Emeralds?”

“Yeah,” said the god. “We’ve got… I’ve got a few of them.”

“Huh,” said Suzy. She didn’t expect that. “I like gems.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” said Suzy. It was easier to talk to the god like this, when she couldn’t see.

Of course, the parts of her body closest to the god were on edge, and her skin just wanted to crawl off and away, but nothing in life is exactly the way we’d like it. 

As strange as it was, Suzy was beginning to become accustomed to being around divinity. It was probably poisoning her in new, creative ways, but that wasn’t something she had to worry about right now. 

“Watch this,” said the god, and against her better instincts, Suzy sat up so she could.

The god was concentrating, and something was coming out of the soil, like a mole.

It was an ruby, roughly the size of Suzy’s fist.

“Oh,” said Suzy, lacking anything else to say.

“Damn,” said Holly. “I was trying to get an emerald.”

The god left it on the ground - didn’t hold it out for Suzy to take, didn’t toss it away. She did nothing at all.

Suzy knew better than to take a gift from a god, if it was one.

… oh, but the selfish bits of her wanted it. Her fingers itched for it; she didn’t know if she’d ever wanted something so badly.

It was shiny, it was beautiful, the kind of deep red that she associated with the pictures she’d seen of candy apples. 

It wasn’t cut, the way Suzy’s mother’s ring was, but it still caught the light, refracting little bits of shining red all around - across the god’s pale skin and Suzy’s own hands. 

It was almost like there was a fire in the center of it. 

She was reminded, inexplicably, of the god’s eyes, even though the colors were wrong. It had the same brightness.

And then the god was gone.

She didn’t say anything before she vanished. 

Fucking gods.

Suzy stared at the ruby for a long time.

She stared at the ruby for a long time, before she picked it up. It was warm to the touch, and she could almost believe that it was a heart beating in her hands. 

… maybe that was too weird. 

Nevertheless, she shoved it into her pocket, and kept her hand around it. 

* * *

Suzy kept the ruby close to her - she slept with it in her pillowcase, and she kept it in her pocket when she went out and about. 

Nobody noticed it.

Then again, why would they? There was always stuff happening around their homestead. Who cared if Suzy was a little quieter than usual?

Jean was noticing a bit, but… well, Jean had her own things to worry about. 

There were strange things going on around the place, the usual things; tomatoes grew antlers, one of the goats began to dance and speak in riddles, as she had become accustomed. 

If nothing else, weird shit happened with the same irregularity that it always had.

The ruby stayed warm in Suzy’s hand, and late at night she could see the tiny flickering heart of it.

* * *

Suzy went back to the clearing with the strange tree.

She sat under it, leaning back into the trunk, and she looked up into the sky, through the prickly leaves.

She held the ruby in her hand, and she turned it, over and over, watching the light catch it. 

The god was… the god was strange looking.

Beautiful, but… strange.

Suzy had never seen a woman like that before - that radiated divinity, that had a cute, turned up nose like that.

What did Suzy want?

She wanted… she wanted something.

The racing in her mind was calmed, as she turned the ruby over and over.

She was… she was lonely, she realized.

The god made her feel different.

Frustrated, almost twitchy, but still different.

It was different from how she felt about her family, different from the occasional visitors. 

It was irritating, it was something else. Something that made her chest hurt, that made her seek out the god.

That was never a good idea, no matter how lonely you were.

She sighed, shoving the ruby into her pocket… and then she looked up, because the moon was out during the day again.

“Bride of the World again,” said the Lady, who was sitting next to Suzy, close enough that her divinity was soaking into Suzy’s skin like sunlight.

Suzy made a shocked noise, and scrambled away, putting more space between the two of them. 

The divinity made her skin tingle, like static electricity. 

“Why are you here?” Suzy asked, trying not to sound too… suspicious.

“Things are a bit out of balance right now,” said the god. 

The Lady of the Underground smiled at Suzy, and her expression was sad.

“Why?”

“A whole bunch of reasons,” said the god. “It would take a while to explain it.”

“I’m not due anywhere,” said Suzy.

That was a dumb thing to say. 

You didn’t talk to gods like that. You didn’t trust them with that kind of information.

But, strangely enough, it felt like she could trust this Lady..

“Well,” said the god, “for starters, there was fuel.”

“Fuel?”

“Yeah,” said the god. “We used it in cars, and a lot of other things.”

“Other things?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was very important at the time, but not now.”

“What changed?”

“We did,” said the god. “Or maybe the world did.” 

“Why did you change?”

The god shrugged. “We just became gods, or angels, or monsters, or heroes. We didn’t… we don’t know why.”

The god’s expression was thoughtful.

“Do you have any ideas?”

This was a dangerous conversation to be having. Suzy’s heart was beating very fast, and she licked her lips, her hands damp with sweat. 

“We’re as clueless as you are,” said the god. “It’s funny, though. It doesn’t feel like I’ve changed that much.”

“I… don’t think it feels like you’ve changed much while you’re doing it,” said Suzy. “Until you look back and see just how much of it has happened.”

“That’s pretty insightful,” said the god.

“... thanks?”

“Wow, I’m sorry.” The Lady sounded self-conscious. Who knew gods could? “That was rude of me.”

Huh.

A god that apologized.

That was unexpected.

“Thank you for your apology,” Suzy replied, because… well, what else to say?

“Have you met her yet?”

“Hm?”

“The Bride of the World. Have you met her?”

“No,” said Suzy. “I’ve heard bits and pieces of it, but I think everyone has.”

The god nodded. “I think… I think we all fall into patterns of some kind, and it just keeps going from there.”

“You think so?”

“I do, yeah,” said the god. “There used to be older gods that we told stories about. Hades, Persephone, Thor, Loki….”

“Who?”

“I suppose you don’t talk about that anymore.”

“Not really, no,” said Suzy. “We don’t want gods around. Even in stories.”

“It’s a pity,” said the god, and she looked a little sad. “Those stories lasted for a long time, before things changed.”

“Tell me one,” Suzy said, before her brain could catch up with her mouth. 

“I don’t remember them all that well,” the god warned, “but, okay…. A long time ago, the world was brought into being by a giant cow, licking things….”

* * *

It had been a weird story.

Not only was it weird, Suzy wasn’t entirely sure it was true.

The sea being a dead giant’s blood, the clouds his brains?

No way.

Although now that she was lying in her backyard, looking through the branches of a tree… the clouds did swirl a bit, and they were the same greyish color.

She’d done enough taxidermy to know what brains looked like.

She sighed and closed her eyes. Behind them, there were lights and ideas, images she’d never thought about before.

Her heart was beating slow and easy in her chest, and if she concentrated hard enough, she could still hear the god’s voice.

She’d asked about the strange tree, as she ran her fingers over the ruby in her pocket. 

“It’s holly,” said the Lady. “That was my name, a long time ago.”

“Oh,” said Suzy. “It’s pretty.”

Was she talking about the name, or about the tree?

She wasn’t sure.

A cow that licked existence… into itself.

That was weird to think about. 

It admittedly wasn’t any weirder than the other shit that went on around here, but still.

She sighed and she stared up at the sky, and for a moment – only a moment, mind – she thought she saw more.

The stars were actual faces, and there were other things, things in the shadows of things, and she was seeing things that were changing.

She blinked, and it was just the sky again.

She was shaking, and she held on to herself, hands on her hips.

For just a moment, she had the sensation of someone else as well.

The terror in the back of her mind was coming from a long while off.

She slid her hand into her pocket, and she held the ruby in her hand, letting the cold, steady weight of it center her.

Maybe she was imagining it, but it felt like it had a heartbeat.

She squeezed it, and she closed her eyes, as ravens danced behind her lids. 

Thought and memory.

Her fingers itched for a paintbrush.

She wanted to paint something interesting.

* * *

Suzy sat on the roof of her house a few nights later.

It was the quietest place around, and it wasn’t exactly a nice place to hang out, what with all the bird shit, but it was nice to just sit there and look at the sky without having to worry about her siblings intruding.

One of her brothers had almost found the ruby.

Sometimes, it felt weird to be so protective of it. It was just a chunk of stone.

But it was _her_ chunk of stone.

There were ghosts of birds around her, perched on the roof. They flickered in and out of her vision, and it was a little bit annoying, but it made her think of the god.

It made her think of Holly.

It was probably a bad idea to think of the Lady of the Underground as someone with a name. Gods weren’t people. 

They didn’t have names.

She looked up into the sky, and she thought of flying.

* * *

Suzy itched.

She itched, and she was restless, in ways that she didn’t understand, except that she wanted…

She didn’t know what it was that she wanted, just that she wanted _more_ of it.

She wondered, irritably, if this was what led to people becoming gods. Wanting to be a new person, wanting to change.

Impulsively, she thought of the god, with her ever shifting hair, and her bare calloused feet

She thought of the plant, with its sharp leaves.

_Holly_.

And the god was there.

Hovering in the air, right there in front of Suzy, like she was standing on something invisible. 

Her skin was pale enough that it almost glowed.

“Hello,” said the god.

“Hi,” said Suzy. 

“So… seen any new movies lately?”

Suzy raised an eyebrow. Movies weren’t a thing that were “new” – they were like stories. There were a given set; you didn’t get more of them. 

It didn’t work like that. 

“Sorry,” said the god. “I forgot who I was talking to.”

Suzy kept looking at her. 

The god sighed, and she stepped off of the air, onto the roof. The metal of the roof made a protesting noise, then went solid. 

There was an alarmed noise from downstairs, until Suzy called out “I’m fine!” to her brother.

Hopefully, they didn’t see the god. 

“What did you do?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” the god said, and she sat down next to Suzy, close enough that they were almost touching.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” said Suzy, and she was surprised at how angry she was, once again. More rage was bubbling out of her, like a rock giving water.

“I’m sorry,” said the god, and she sounded it, too. She looked at Suzy, full in the face, and her hair was dark in the moonlight, eating up the shadows.

Her tattoos were moving across her skin, and Suzy wondered if that was where the birds came from - the ghost birds, that tried to preen their hair or nibble on their fingers.

“I… changed the composition of the metal,” said the god. “I belong to the underground, and the metal knows that and I know that. It… wanted to be rock. I had to remind it what it was.”

That sounded like utter gibberish, but Suzy still nodded.

“Although all metal is also technically rock,” said the god. “Sort of.”

Suzy shot the god a look. She didn’t know if the god could understand what it meant.

She didn’t know if _she_ understood what it meant.

What was she feeling?

Suzy was used to knowing her own feelings, the interior of her own mind, the geography of her thoughts. Now it was like someone had gone in one night and scribbled all over the map, and she was left looking at it, scratching her head.

She was lost, in a way that she couldn’t talk about.

If she mentioned the whole “god” thing, her parents might kick her out, or lock her away until even a hint of the god was gone.

She wasn’t supposed to want the god so near her.

But she wanted it. 

She wanted…. 

Honestly, she didn’t know what she wanted.

She took the ruby out of her pocket, and just held it.

“Oh,” said the god. “You kept that?”

“Yeah,” said Suzy. “Tell me about something.”

“What kind of something?” The god looked nervous - was she expecting Suzy to ask her about the secrets of the universe or something?

“Holly,” said Suzy. 

“The plant, or… the person?”

“Isn’t the person you?”

Suzy looked over at the god. They were sitting so close together that she could have reached out and touched her.

What would a god’s skin feel like?

What would… _this_ god’s skin feel like?

Suzy flopped back and covered her face with both hands. Why was she so… whatever this was?

“Are you alright?” the god asked, concerned.

“I used to… I used to think that I knew myself,” said Suzy. “I knew what was dangerous, I knew what was safe. I knew… who I was, who I wanted to be.”

“Who did you want to be?”

The god’s voice was achingly gentle.

“I wanted to be… myself,” said Suzy, very quietly.

The air around the god smelled… different. A bit like new dirt, right when you’re getting ready to plant something. 

And just like that, there were tears streaming down her face. Wet, drippy tears, puddling off of her chin, soaking into the collar of her shirt.

“Oh, honey.” The god reached out with one hand, to cup Suzy’s cheek.

And Suzy let her. 

She just let the god touch her – let _Holly_ touch her, let her wipe the tears off of her face with a thumb.

The tears fell onto the roof, and they clattered - they were little shards of quartz now, the size of her pinky fingernail. They were grey and smokey - were they full of her feelings?

“Oh,” Suzy said. 

“I know it’s scary,” said Holly. her voice was tender and her skin was warm, and she smelled a little bit like ozone and fresh dirt.

Suzy’s heart was beating very fast. 

“It’s scary, becoming a new person,” Holly said. “I guess it’s scarier for you, because… changes around here are a lot more permanent.”

The god’s hand left Suzy’s face, and then it was going down Suzy’s arm to her hand. Holly rested her palm on top of Suzy’s hand, squeezing her fingers.

Suzy watched, entranced, as one of Holly’s bird tattoos sidled down Holly’s arm, moving to nose at Suzy’s fingers.

She could almost feel it. 

“You said you didn’t change, in the old days,” Suzy said, her voice quiet. Her head was beginning to hurt. She was blinking, only it felt like she was blinking… more. 

Blinking with more eyes than she actually had. 

“We did. Everyone changes. It’s part of growing up. You go from being a baby to a child to an adult. I know change must be scary, especially for you, living in this world–”

“In this world?”

“We didn’t used to change so drastically. People could change their appearance, but… not the way you are.”

“The way _I_ am?”

“Your… people,” Holly hedged. “Not necessarily you.”

“I’m not going to change,” Suzy said. 

“You think?” Holly pulled her hand back, and Suzy already mourned the loss of it. 

She leaned back, her hands behind her head, and the line of her profile caught the light of the moon.

Holly was very beautiful.

It struck Suzy, as if it was just a thing that she knew.

How could she be so beautiful?

It wasn’t even an otherworldly beauty, just beautiful.

What would have it been like, if Holly had just grown up here? If she hadn’t been from… elsewhere, if she had just been the girl who lived nearby?

Suzy could have tried courting her; painting things for her, or maybe bringing Holly animals she’d stuffed.

Did Holly like taxidermied animals?

Suzy’s mom had said, in the old days, that two women or two men together was frowned on, but… well, who cared these days?

If you wanted children, there were plenty of parentless ones wandering around, who had lost their parents to gods.

Some gods even granted you children, if you knew who and how to ask, although that… wasn’t much of a thing. Children that came from gods became heroes, or gods themselves. 

Anyway, Suzy didn’t want children. What was the point of having children, to have them turn to angels or gods or something like that? 

But… she could imagine courting Holly, living with her. Maybe building a house together.

“Do gods love people?”

Where had that come from?

“What do you mean?”

“Do you… need us?”

“I don’t know,” said the god, Holly, the Lady of the Underground.

Who _was_ she?

Was she… all of those things?

Suzy saw them, all three of them at once, like looking through a crystal prism. 

She saw Holly, the girl who was, wearing clothes like the old pictures, and she had pink hair, and she cuddled a pigeon to her chest.

She saw the divinity, boiling around a figure that was barely human shaped, barely… anything, no features, just a howling void. 

And she saw the Lady of the Underground, with a crown of jewels, her skin as pale as bone, her eyes as green as the sun through leaves, her hair like quicksilver. 

Suzy saw all of them out of different eyes, and she was going to scream, she was going to die.

She stood up, right there on the roof of her parents’ house, and she heard it all.

She heard individual atoms moving, and the wordless presence of something, or maybe Something.

Or maybe Someone.

She turned her face to the sky, and in the heavens she could name every star, and she knew the story behind them, and when they would die, and how they would be reborn. 

She threw her head back and screamed. 

It was the scream of her mortality, which had been seeping out of her, drop by drop by drop, leaving all at once.

Her body wasn’t meat and bone and sinew. It was changing, and she was screaming at the pain of it, at the loss.

There was pain bursting out of her back, out of her shoulders, and there was the snap and crackle as the firmament itself burrowed into her sides, and a second pair hands opened to the sky and grasped for the heavens. 

She could see everything.

She could see the city that had been there, new and shining, then burning, then gone, and she could see it all at once from a different eye. 

She saw every single future, she saw her parents dying, her siblings growing old, having children, dying.

They were babies and they were bones in the ground, all at once, and she saw every single one of them with eyes she hadn’t had.

She was standing before the house, on the air, and she was screaming. 

And then there was a hand covering her eyes; not all of her eyes, she could see… everything, and it wasn’t from her face, it was on her back, it was on her whole body.

She was still screaming. 

There was a mouth pressed against hers, and there were hands on the eyes on her face, and the eyes on her back could see _everything_ , every possible future, every possible past.

No wonder the gods were mad, if this was what became of them.

But right here and now, she was being kissed, and it tasted like metal and like dirt, it tasted like the beginning of things, and the end of things. 

The sight on her back dimmed, and the pain was quiet, but she was… she was on the air.

She had wings, and on those wings were eyes. Her shirt was torn, and she was holding the Lady of the Underground around the waist, with two sets of arms. 

She was crying, and her tears were turning into more smokey quartz, clattering down onto the ground. 

It hurt. 

It hurt, and her parents were there, but they were screaming, and she had wings, and then she was on the ground. When she stepped, the earth seemed to boil, to seethe, and then it was glass. 

The Lady of the Underground (and the god and Holly, and so many other people, all stacked up on top of each other, peering at Suzy) was holding her, and they were walking, and the wings on Suzy’s back were covered in eyes, and she could see the footprints she left behind, made of glass. 

Footprints and a trail of smokey quartz. 

“Come on,” Holly said, and she was pressing her forehead against Suzy’s, and then they were far away. 

Suzy’s parents house was nowhere in sight, the forest was nowhere in sight, the mountains were nowhere in sight. 

They were beside a huge, crashing wall of water. 

“Where are we? What… happened?”

“You were changing,” said Holly, and now she sounded like she was scared.

Suzy kept the eyes on her face shut, and she couldn’t do anything about the eyes on her back. The wings were fanning out, and she had more than a bird did.

She was aware of it, she was aware of almost _everything_ , all around her, and the awareness was enough to eat her alive.

The sky was going to swallow her whole. 

She could see the future, and she could see the past, and she could see the present, and every one of her eyes. She couldn’t close them.

“I can see everything,” said Suzy, and her voice sounded wrong to her ears. 

“I know,” said Holly, and she was kissing Suzy. She still tasted like her metal teeth, and some more of Suzy’s eyes closed, and it was a blessed relief.

“What’s happening?”

“You were chosen, to be… an angel, or something,” said Holly. “I… I intervened. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

“Why?”

“Because… I want you to keep being you. Not to join the choir angelic.”

“So what am I?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

Suzy’s head was full. It was knowledge without context, knowledge that filled her whole self, and every blinking eye across the great spread of wings across her back seemed to fill her with more. 

It was knowledge that she didn’t _know_. It was just data; words in languages she didn’t recognize, names, songs, faces unlike any she’d ever seen. The stars each had a thousand names, and they would lose them, they would gain new ones, and it filled her head and filled her mind, until she was screaming again. Her scream filled the silence, filled everything, rivaled only by the crash of the ocean. 

It was beginning to overwrite her own memory. Already she was forgetting her brother’s name, her mother’s voice, her favorite color. 

“Holly!” Suzy wailed, and it filled the air like a crack of thunder, and the clouds above their heads split.

More smoky quartz tumbled to the ground, and the sand turned to glass, and melted, and reformed under her feet.

And then… there was a hole in the air. 

There was no other way to describe it. It was a hole in the air, like a tear in a curtain. 

Holly (and the Lady of the Underground, the god, the Commander, the demon witch, and all the thousand people that were the same person) took one of Suzy’s hands in her own, and led Suzy through it. 

The darkness closed around the two of them, and Suzy was, aware of the earth above them for miles and miles, and every speck of dirt had a story behind it, and she could see those stories too.

She passed out.

All of the eyes dimmed, and she was silent, inside and out. 

* * *

Suzy woke up, and she opened her eyes.

… she opened some of her eyes.

Some of the eyes on her body had _been_ open, and some of them were closing, but she was still covered in them, and she was…. 

Fuck, who was she?

“Mort,” said Holly. 

She didn’t look like Holly anymore, not in this place. She looked like the Lady of the Underground, with her crown of uncut jewels and her bare feet.

“That’s not my name,” said Suzy. 

“It’s the only name of yours that I know,” said the Lady.

“Suzy,” she said. What did it matter if the god knew it now? She wasn’t a human being anymore; her mortality had melted into the soil, and now she was… something new.

“Suzy,” Holly repeated, and it sounded like a person saying it, not a god or a Lady.

“I don’t think that’s who I am anymore,” said Suzy. 

“Well,” said Holly, “if you need help with… everything, I’m here.”

“Where are we?”

Suzy stood up, and she staggered. She had a second pair of arms, sprouting out of her sides. She had wings covered in eyes, and she could see behind her, see in front of her, see all around her.

Suzy’s mind was filling up again, and the panic was coming with it.

But Holly was there, taking one set of hands - the bottom set.

Which were the original ones?

Suzy didn’t know anymore.

She couldn’t remember. 

“We’re… elsewhere,” said Holly. 

“Where is elsewhere?”

“In a sense, it’s underground,” said Holly. “But it’s also not, exactly.”

“How does that even work?”

Anger flared out of Suzy, and she was… she was blazing like the sun. Her emotions were right at the surface, and the rage was like lava, spewing out of her. 

And Holly was bigger.

She was bigger and stronger, her hands covering Suzy’s, and her power….

Suzy had been aware of Holly’s power, but she could feel it, she could _see_ it now. It was cloaking her, covering her like a fog.

“I know you’re hurting,” said Holly, and her voice was full of compassion, but it also had something else in it, some bit of anger.

It was like iron ore, buried in the softness of dirt.

“I want to go home,” Suzy said. 

Holly didn’t say anything - the mist billowed across Suzy’s skin.

“I want to go home!” Suzy repeated, louder. She was fury, and she was the sun, and she was…. 

What could she do? She could see it all, and she didn’t know what all of it was, except that it was still… there.

But she didn’t remember the way home. 

She didn’t remember what home _was_ , except it wasn’t here.

She could praise a king in Akkadian, she could disassemble and reassemble a rifle in under a minute, she knew the secret recipe for KFC, and thousands of other things she had never seen or read or learned, but she didn’t know where home was.

Her head was nothing but knowledge that she had no use for, and it was filling her up again, even inside the mist of the Lady of the Underground’s magic. 

Suzy wanted to scream again, but Holly was looking at her, with those big green eyes.

She reached out, taking one of her hands.

Suzy had four hands now, and she didn’t know how to work them.

“You want to look around?” Holly asked quietly.

“Aren’t we just underground? What’s there to see?”

Suzy was still wearing all of her clothes, although her shirt was ripped. The ruby was still in her pocket, and it thudded against her leg. She reached one of her hands into her pocket and took it out.

The ruby was the same, uncut, catching the light.

Wait, _what_ light?

“If we’re underground, how can we see anything?”

“The souls of the dead light up the place,” said Holly, and she was leading Suzy down into a cave.

Suzy pressed the ruby back into her pocket, and the beat of it against her leg as she walked was like the beat of a heart.

“Oh,” said Suzy.

She’d always found death fascinating - it was one of the reasons she’d become so enamored with taxidermy. But now she was in the place of death, surrounded by faceless ghosts glowing like fireflies all around them, walking through them. 

It was quieter than she had imagined.

Sadder, too. 

Suzy… missed the sky.

Longed for it.

She could see ghosts, all around her, as after-images. All of her could - she had eyes on her wings, and it felt like they were elsewhere, too. Some of them were covered by her clothes, and she could count the threads. 

“Welcome to the Underworld, Mort,” said the god.

“You don’t have to keep calling me Mort,” said Suzy. 

It was odd to be holding Holly’s hand, after all this time spent not touching her.

But Suzy was a god too now. Who cared?

The caverns were huge - there were great jagged bits of rock hanging from the ceiling, like the teeth of some great monster. Everything glittered, covered in shiny substances, jewels and precious metals.

“I think of you as Mort,” said Holly, and she flashed Suzy a nervous smile.

The tattoos on Holly’s arms were roaming, up and down. One of them was nuzzling against Holly’s cheek, opening its beak to caw silently. 

“So you’re the god of the dead?”

“I’m _a_ god of the dead,” Holly corrected. 

“Right,” said Suzy.

“But all things underground are my domain.”

“All things underground?”

“Jewels,” said Holly. “Metal. Growing things.”

“So… am _I_ now yours?”

“Not exactly,” said Holly. “I… used my magic, to change you. Or to stop you from changing.”

“Why did you do that?”

They had stopped in what looked like an old library, from the pictures that Suzy had seen. There were great pillars carved out of the stone, and there were shelves after shelves after shelves of books.

“It’s a mess, sorry,” said Holly, and she sounded… embarrassed, letting go of Suzy’s hand and going around to arrange stuff.

She still hadn’t answered the question.

“I’ve never seen this many books,” said Suzy. 

“Well,” said Holly, “there are a lot of books underground these days, what with one thing and another.”

Suzy didn’t understand that, exactly. She wandered around, looking at all of the titles, brushing her hands across the spines.

She didn’t understand much of anything anymore.

Her brain was still overloaded, from all the extra information she was absorbing, all the extra sensory information, just… there. 

It was like trying to control a river through a tiny faucet. It just… stayed there, blocked up, always there but also not.

She didn’t feel like a god.

She didn’t feel like an angel, or a monster, or anything but herself. 

Barring anything else to do, she sat in a chair, and looked around the great room, filled with bookshelves taller than she had ever seen. 

It didn’t _look_ that messy, but how was she supposed to know what it would look like neat?

Things in her family were always a bit cluttered, since there were so many people in such a small space.

And now here she was, in some vast, underground library, some strange freak, caught halfway between being a human and... whatever it was that she was. 

“So… what happened?”

The god, who had been taking books off of tables and shoving them onto shelves at random, paused. “In what sense?”

She looked nervous.

“One minute, we were… sitting on my roof, the next, all of this happened.”

Suzy tried to spread her wings, and knocked over a small table. The wings were vast - bigger than Suzy was, by far. There were at least seven of them, layered over each other, sprouting from her back like the petals of a chrysanthemum. 

Could she fly?

She… didn’t want to. But she was aching for the sky, and not the dimness.

She hadn’t even realized how much she valued the sky, until she didn’t have it anymore.

“I think… you were called,” said Holly. 

“Called?”

“Sometimes angels are needed. But since there aren’t angels anymore, you got called instead.”

“Why aren’t there any angels anymore? One of my friends became an angel, when I was a kid.”

“Of course,” said Holly. “It’s… complicated.”

Suzy frowned, crossed her own arms, then crossed the second pair. Both of them were hers, but they were also… foreign. 

Already, she couldn’t remember which pair came first. The memory had probably been swallowed up by a recipe for beer bread, or a Sumerian song to the great fish god.

“It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” she finally said.

“I also don’t know that much,” said Holly, and she flopped in the chair across from Suzy, leaning into the plush of it.

“Can you tell me what you do know?”

“I know that there aren’t any angels left that didn’t start out as angels,” said Holly. 

She was stretching. Her feet were bare, and the skin was pale in the corpse light.

The library floor was carpeted with old rugs, softer than any Suzy had ever encountered. She curled her toes into the thickness of it. 

"What do you mean, that didn't start as angels?"

"It's complicated," Holly said again, and she looked slightly at a loss.

Suzy sighed. "I guess I can read up on it later," she said, and then she drew her wings around herself, covering her face and her upper body with feathers and dozens of winking, blinking eyes.

She could see all around her, and it was enough to make her a little sick.

Was she ever going to get used to this? How could she?

She brought her legs up inside her nest of wings, and she wrapped both sets of arms around her legs.

"We should get you some clothes that fit you," said Holly, her voice coming from a long way off. "Since your current ones are kind of falling apart."

That got Suzy to poke her head out from amongst her own eyes and feathers. "Excuse me?"

She was glaring at Holly. She didn't even realize she was, until she felt the heat coming from her face.

"While I understand that you're mad," Holly said, and her voice had a controlled tightness to it, "I would appreciate if you wouldn't start blazing with holy light in the library. Things can catch fire."

Was Suzy blazing with holy light?

She looked down at her own hands. She was indeed blazing like the sun.

"Oh," Suzy said quietly. The light was fading, slowly.

"I know how that feels, a bit," said Holly. "When I first... ascended, things were weird. How about I get you some food?"

"Food?"

"Are you hungry?"

Suzy followed after Holly, and her wings trailed after her, and knocked over more tables. She wasn’t trying to,, she was trying not to make a mess, she was just trying to _move_.

The souls of the dead were all around them, faintly glowing outlines, flickering and vanishing around them.

They gave Suzy the creeps.

They were walking through the great, terrifying halls again - the ceilings were higher than anything that Suzy could ever begin to imagine. It was strange to know that there was this much empty space under the world.

Or were they in a different world?

Was she overthinking this?

"I want to go back to the surface," Suzy said, as they walked through the caverns.

The ground under her feet was covered in pebbles, but it didn't hurt. 

Was she not... connected to her body anymore? Did she not feel pain anymore?

That was a strange thing to think.

She pinched herself, and that felt real.

And then they were in a kitchen.

At least Suzy thought it was a kitchen. She saw a fridge, she saw a sink, but there was so much _space_.

Her head was hurting, from all of this, from all of the new input, from all the new... everything.

"What would you like?"

Old bits of memories were hitting Suzy in the back of the head. "I’m not supposed to take food from a god."

She knew some stories and old myths – did she know them from books her parents had squirreled away, or did she know them because of this newfound knowledge that was pouring into her head like water from a pitcher? 

"Did you steal me?" Suzy's voice was rough, as things were forming in her head. Some kind of new, strange connections being made in her brain.

She knew things.

Maybe it hadn't been a book.

"Lady of Ways, Lady of Means," Suzy blurted out, almost singing. 

Holly turned around, looking over at Suzy. "I haven't heard that in a very long time," she Holly.

She was holding something in her hands; a big, heavy fruit. Suzy didn't see much fruit, beyond the orchards that grew wild around her parent's house; there were apples. most of them not good for anything but feeding animals and making alcohol.

Not that she’d had much experience with alcohol either.

This fruit was big, red, and glossy, with a tuft on the top. It reminded her of an apple, but rounder.

The apples that they grew were small, knobbly, sharp things.

"What is it?"

"This?” Holly held it out. “It's a pomegranate."

Suzy reached out for it with two hands, on the same side, and her wings flew open again, and she could see directly behind her. 

Holly put it in the top hand. 

Suzy held it in her hands - it was dense, heavier than it looked. When she pressed down on it, it kept its shape, different from the apples. 

"It's...." 

Holly looked thoughtful, and nervous. "If you tried that, you'd... you'd be here with me. For... for good."

"You mean I can... I can leave now?"

"You could, technically," said the god. "But I wouldn't advise it."

"Why not?"

"You're still too… you know….” Holly made a vague hand gesture. 

Suzy frowned, and was aware, faintly, of the fact that she was glowing once again. . 

She tried to stop.

She tried to... she tried to stop feeling anything, to turn herself off.

"Is it only if I eat this?"

"It's not only if you eat that," said Holly. "If you eat other stuff, it would work too, theoreticallly. But this, _specifically_ , it’s. Well…."

"Why?"

"A very old story," said the god, and she looked sad. "When I was growing up, everyone knew it."

"We don't tell old stories anymore." 

“Why?”

“Because… if we tell the stories, it brings about more gods.”

“Does it?”

“That’s the theory.” Suzy shrugged. It was an expansive shrug - both sets of arms got in on the act, and her wings (the seven plus of them) did as well. “But there were a lot of things I thought were true, but they’re not anymore.”

She handed the red fruit back to Holly.

Holly took it, and her expression was unreadable. “If you don’t want to stay with me, I’d recommend staying away from fruit in general.”

“Really?”

“Apples are a definite no,” said Holly. “To whatever degree the old theology still applies.”

Suzy blinked, many times and in many places. 

“What?”

“You know,” said Holly. “The garden? The snake?”

Suzy kept looking at Holly, confused.

Holly sighed, and she rubbed her eyes. Her hair was the colors you see when you stare into the darkness too long, and the shadows all converge.

“Okay,” she said. “So a long time ago, people believed….”

* * *

There were a lot of stories about gods, it turned out. 

At one point, Holly ran out of stuff she remembered, and then they sat together, reading, as Holly explained certain words.

“So are you like Hades?”

It had been… how long had it been? How could she tell?

Suzy stretched, her limbs sore, stiff, her back aching. 

What was time, when there wasn’t any sun, any stars?

All of Suzy’s eyes, pointing in all the different directions, shut, and there was a lovely moment of darkness and peace. Then they opened again, and more knowledge filled her.

“I’m not Hades,” Holly said quickly. She sighed, tilting back in her chair and rubbing her eyes. “Or… maybe I am. But I guess I’m also Persephone. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“It’s not exactly a one to one comparison,” said Holly. “I’m a mix of both, I guess. And myself.”

“I haven’t seen you… do anything,” said Suzy. She stretched again, her wings flapping out around her. “With the dead, I mean. Apart from the pigeons.”

The eyes were all open at once, and it took every bit of self control not to scream. Information rushed in, filled her up, and then… was gone again. 

Her head ached, and she sighed

“I don’t really have to… do anything,” said Holly, and she was barefoot again, in a black dress. Her hair turned the colors of the sky, the cavern, then back to its ‘normal’ color, whatever that was.

Some kind of non-color.

She was very beautiful, and Suzy was struck with the urge to kiss her. 

She wanted to kiss Holly, so badly, and she was flushing, and she was glowing like a lamp.

Oh, Holly was so beautiful. 

Beautiful like the ruby, which was still in her pocket. 

She was wearing the same clothes.

They probably still smelled like home, whatever home was or had been.

She covered her face with both hands, then with her other two hands, and that was odd.

She sighed, and her wings shook. 

Sometimes, if she didn’t pay any attention, it was almost like they ran through each other.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how that worked.

“No?”

“Me being here is one of the things that keeps it all running.”

“What happens if it stops?”

Holly looked uncomfortable for the first time, as she rubbed her hands together. 

“Well,” said the god, and she was the god right now, not Holly, “things… happen.”

She was avoiding Suzy’s gaze.

There were a lot of eyes to avoid.

“What sort of things?”

And then Suzy’s stomach growled, loudly enough that they could both hear it. 

“We shouldn’t talk about this when you’re so hungry,” said Holly. 

“Am I stuck here no matter what I eat?”

“No,” said Holly, and she made a face. “That’s mostly dumb folklore. Still, I wouldn't touch fruit.”

As they were walking back to the kitchen, Suzy’s bare feet were… not on the ground any longer.

She wasn’t flying, she wasn’t hovering, she was just walking a few inches off of the ground. She didn’t even realize she was doing it, until she did. 

She tripped, only to be grabbed by Holly, pulled chest to chest. 

Suzy’s wings flared open, wrapping around the both of them. She could see all of Holly, glimpses of who Holly had been, and there were all those women who looked like Holly but weren’t, who were Holly but didn’t look like her. 

They were breathing each other’s breath, and it was already growing warm, under the heavy, feathery, blinking tent of her wings. 

And Suzy’s head was spinning.

Oh.

Suzy pulled back, and her wings withdrew.

She was blushing.

Holly’s hair was pink.

“So what would you like to eat?”

“What are my options?”

“Just about anything,” said Holly, and she smiled, looking sheepish. 

“Yeah?”

“Any memory of anything is here,” said Holly. “My memories are the strongest, obviously.”

“Really?”

“I’m the most… real person here. Apart from you, I suppose.”

“Is there anyone else?”

“Not like us.”

“Us?”

“We’re… complicated,” said Holly. 

She opened up the giant fridge, and it was vast and cold, cold enough to hit Suzy like a hammer to the gut. 

There was just… endless everything.

“I… don’t know what I want.”

“Well,” said Holly, “I was a vegetarian.”

“Was?”

“I don’t need to eat the way I used to. “I don’t know if _you_ need to, though,” said Holly. “It’s complicated.”

“Everything is complicated,” Suzy grumbled.

“That’s how it goes sometimes,” Holly said, and then she was digging through the fridge, and coming out with a loaf of bread and yellow butter.

She’d never seen butter like that before.

“So,” said Holly, “we’ve got jam, too.”

“What kind of jam?”

“Just about any kind,” said Holly, and she was smiling. “Would you like it?”

“Sure,” said Suzy, and her stomach growled again.

* * *

There was jam, and there was bread - white, sweet bread that she’d never heard before, with a sharp aftertaste and a crust that crunched between her back teeth.

“You know, it’s funny - I think you’re healthier than I ever was.”

“Hm?”

Suzy, on her third piece of bread and jam, looked up at Holly, confused.

“Homemade food was a big thing, back in the day,” said the god. “It was a sign of having the time and money to do it, instead of buying pre-packaged stuff.”

… pre-packaged? 

What did that even mean?

Holly was eating… actually, what was she eating?

She was fiddling with… something, and then Suzy saw… it was a ruby.

What the fuck?

And the god as eating it.

“Are you….”

“I’m not made of the same stuff as you are,” said Holly, as if that was an answer.

“So you eat rubies?”

“I can eat precious stones, yeah,” said Holly. “Or any other kind of precious thing.”

“... why?”

“It’s kind of… a long story,” said the god. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Suzy said, and she crossed her arms - both sets.

The look was probably somewhat lessened by the glob of jelly on her chin.

But still. 

“A long time ago,” said Holly, and she looked uncomfortable, “before the gods, I mean, or at least… before we knew about the gods… before all of that, there was… there was a famine. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“It was… unpleasant,” said Holly, her tone flat. “And there were people who had a lot of money, and there were people who didn’t have any.”

“Money?”

Suzy knew faintly about it, but she didn’t really live in a place that had money. 

“Yeah. And the rich… the rich were so rich that they were eating things like gold on or in their food. So… for whatever reason, when I became a god, I can now eat precious things.”

“... why?”

“It has something to do with belief, something to do with… what people think of you,” said Holly. 

“Yeah?”

Suzy tried to imagine eating gold.

She knew what metal tasted like, but… chewing it?

What would that be like?

The god didn’t seem to be bothered - the ruby crunched like someone chewing on popcorn kernels, which might have been… unpleasant, but then again, the god’s teeth were also made of metal. 

“Why are you a god of death, anyway?”

“I’m not technically a god of death… per se,” said the god, and she looked a bit conflicted. “Technically, I’m a god of _the_ dead.”

“What’s the difference?”

And then Holly got very quiet, and Suzy realized that she had stuck her foot in her mouth, somehow.

Welp.

She busied herself with putting the dishes in the sink, then washing her face.

“A lot of people died,” said Holly, as if she was a long way off.

Suzy looked over her shoulder at Holly.

Holly was staring straight ahead, and her expression was blank. Her hair was the color of iron.

“A lot of people died, and it was… it was complicated. For complicated reasons, I mean. And… I don’t remember all of it. Part of divinity is losing some bits of yourself.”

The gaping holes in Suzy’s memory – what did her mother’s face look like? What did her father’s voice sound like? – ached like a rotten tooth. 

“But a lot of people died, and the government couldn’t do much about it, since they were all dying, too. So a bunch of us… dealt with it. And I had… experience with all of that, so… we put on heavy gloves and heavy boots and we got the bodies out of the locked rooms and the street, and we… dealt with it.”

There were tears dripping down the god’s face, and they looked like they were made of mercury. 

“And then… well, you know how it is. One minute you’re yourself, the next minute, something… happens, and then you’re not.”

That hadn’t been what it had been like for Suzy, but… well, these things were complicated.

She took a cautious step towards Holly, then another.

“I hated what happened to the dead. All of that. Just rotting, gathering flies. People were getting sicker, and it was just… disgusting. So I guess… they decided that the needed someone like me, to deal with it.”

“They?”

Holly gave a big, expansive shrug. “Whoever it is that makes us gods. Or whatever.”

Suzy moved closer, as the god kept crying. 

“Eventually… at some point, there were a lot less people, and… I became something else. I don’t know. Maybe I got mixed up with some other god, from who knows when, and I stopped being a god of the dead, and became the Lady of the Underground, and... well, that’s who I’ve been. For a while.”

“How long?”

Holly shrugged.

“Time runs differently down here.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah,” said Holly. “Since we’re kinda-sorta in a different world.”

“... are we?”

“Yeah,” said Holly, and she grinned, crooked. “I came here for what felt like… maybe a few months. I went back up and saw the world had moved on.”

Suzy’s heart began to beat a little faster. “Does that mean my family is already dead?”

“It hasn’t been that long,” Holly assured Suzy, in what was clearly a ‘please stay calm’ sort of voice.

“I can’t… I want to go home,” Suzy said, and the homesickness that hit her was like a sledgehammer to the gut. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Holly. 

“Why not?” 

“I... I like you being here,” said Holly, and she was rubbing her hands together. “And I... I worry that you’re not ready yet.”

“Ready?” 

“Because… you know, how you see the… because you can see everything, and there’s a lot more everything up there.”

“What?”

“You… your magic, or your divinity, it seems to be related to… to knowing things. To seeing things, since you seem to just be filling up. And I like you, I don’t… I don’t want you to be erased. To just become a vessel.”

“So you’ve trapped me underground for my own good?”

The rage was boiling out of her again. 

Suzy was… she was glowing, and her wings were flaring out. 

She could see everything, and everything was tinged with red.

And then Holly was there.

Holly was there, and she took up all of Suzy’s vision – every eye filled with Holly’s face.

“I know you are scared and hurting,” said Holly, “but you are in my domain. Please believe me that I don’t want to hurt you, but you have to calm down before you burn the place down around our ears.”

And then… Suzy leaned forward, and she was kissing Holly, the mercury smearing across her cheeks.

The fire inside of Suzy was still burning. It was like swallowing lava.

She could have boiled from the inside out. Instead, she spread her wings again, until the two of them were surrounded by rustling feathers and who even knew how many blinking eyes.

“I’ve been so lonely,” Holly said, and her voice was… broken.

From her many eyes, Suzy could see all the variations of Holly, of the god, of the Lady of the Underground.

And yes, she saw… she saw the heavy gloves, the heavy boots, the bandanna tied around her face, the despair setting in at the backs of Holly’s eyes. 

She kissed Holly again, as if she could swallow down all of that sorrow, all of that pain.

What was it like, to know a different world but then live in this one?

Imagine having to clear out that many bodies, having to bury your friends. Suzy saw it play out, with whatever magic or godly sight it was that she had.

“I’m sorry,” said Suzy, said Mort, the thing that wasn’t an angel and wasn’t a mortal, the thing that was above and beyond all of that. 

Who was she anymore?

How did you get a name, as a god?

… was she a god?

“I’m sorry,” Holly, and her heart sounded like it was breaking. 

“I miss the sky,” Suzy said, her voice very quiet.

“I’m sorry for taking it from you,” said Holly. “I… it’s my fault.”

“Why?” Suzy kept both sets of arms on Holly, one set draped over her shoulders, one set wrapped around her waist. 

“If I hadn’t gone up above, you might not have become… well, like this,” said Holly. “And if I’d just have let you change… well, you’d be whatever it was you were supposed to be, instead of who you are now.”

Suzy withdrew her wings, withdrew everything else. Her heart was beating very fast.

“So I’m not a god or an angel?”

“Or a monster, or anything like that. You’re just… what you are.” Holly shoved her hands into her pockets, and she looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I’ve done you a great disservice,” she told Suzy. “I should probably have let you change. Or gotten you to stop spending time with me.”

Suzy shrugged. “It wouldn’t have worked,” she told Holly. “I’m stubborn.”

Holly looked faintly amused. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” said Suzy. “Although… I think I want to sleep some more.”

“Of course,” said the god, and she reached out for Suzy, then drew her hand back. 

Suzy put one set of hands into her own pockets, and squeezed the ruby.

It was hard and familiar under her fingers.

“Am I going to get to a point where I don’t need to sleep anymore? Do gods usually sleep?”

“They do, sometimes,” said Holly. “Some gods are mostly known for sleeping. There are some things that aren’t exactly gods that are dreaming the world away.”

“Dreaming the world away?”

“It’s… complicated,” said Holly, as they walked through the caverns.

The caverns seemed to have changed.

Maybe it was a different route?

The food in Suzy’s belly was roiling all of a sudden.

There was something… strange about all of this. 

More of her eyes were opening up.

Was she waking up some more?

The roar of knowledge she had felt above ground was a trickle, but it was still there, dripping like water on a stone. It was going to wear her down eventually, wasn’t it?

But here was the room, with its lush canopy bed, its huge wardrobe.

“I, uh… I had it made for you,” said Holly, and she sounded embarrassed as she rubbed her hands together.

“Had it made?”

“It’s complicated,” said the god, and she looked tired. “I’m sorry.”

“I want to kiss you again,” Suzy said, out of nowhere.

“Yeah?”

Holly was blushing. The mercury had left her face, at least.

Suzy came closer, until the two of them were closer, almost belly to belly.

“I’ve kissed a few other people.”

“Have you?”

“One of the neighbor boys,” Suzy murmured, and then she was leaning in, and she was kissing Holly.

Suzy was very much kissing _Holly_ , not kissing the Lady of the Underground, or the god, or any of the many other people who she was.

She held Holly, belly to belly, forehead to forehead, and they kissed like it was the end of the world. 

* * * 

Suzy stopped asking about going above ground. 

She was forgetting what her family was like – her brother’s smile, her sister’s laugh – but she still remembered seeing them turn to bones. 

How could she look them in the face, when some part of her saw them as nothing but moss-covered bones? 

Holly was ever changing and stationary, in that contradictory way that all gods were. 

At least Suzy didn’t see her dying. 

* * * 

Suzy learned about things.

Some of it had to do with the ridiculous amount of knowledge in her head without any… well, context.

She knew the praises in Akkadian for gods who had been dead longer than the wheel had existed. 

It took her… who even knew how long, until she was reading ancient texts saying their names, and it all fell into place.

Suzy began to bake. She slept and she woke, and time stopped meaning anything, so why not bake and cook, and do all of those things she had enjoyed when she was living above ground?

Holly was game to try most things, as long as they weren’t meat. 

Suzy liked the kitchen – it was huge, and she was never worried about knocking something over with her wings, or being in the way.

Holly said that she didn’t cook much, since she didn’t need to eat that often, and could subsist on things like diamonds or platinum. 

It was… it was Suzy’s place, in the great network of the underground.

She could always find the kitchen, and it was a place that she was making hers, instead of the (admittedly lavish) bedroom that popped up when she went looking for it. 

She slept less; she had weird dreams when she slept.

It was… it was uncomfortable.

She couldn’t summon things from the firmament the way that Holly could.

The god was always Holly now. Even with all the other selves that Suzy saw contained within her, they were all variations of Holly. 

Holly had given Suzy the full run of her library. She let Suzy use a sewing machine, too, and helped create clothes that better fit her, now that she had four arms and ever expanding wings.

Well… maybe not ever expanding.

They seemed to stick to seven, or at least… divisions of seven.

When she was reading, or when she was acquiring new knowledge, they sometimes expanded.

She sat with Holly at an old wooden table one time she declared to be night, when she had been underground long enough that she was beginning to forget the warmth of the sun.

“Why do gods die?"

Suzy was sewing the hem on a dress. It was printed with little beetles, their shells as iridescent as an oil slick.

She'd found it squirreled away in the back of her wardrobe – a gift from Holly?

"It's complicated," said Holly.

She was resting her elbows on the table, watching Suzy sew.

Suzy had carefully, methodically drilled a small hole into the center of the ruby, and now wore it as a pendant around her neck. It thumped against her collarbone when she shifted. 

"Everything is complicated," Suzy said, and she bit the thread to cut it, then tied a knot.

"Well, not everything," said Holly. "Some things are simple."

"Like what?"

"... pigeons. Pigeons are simple."

"Are they?"

"They do have rich emotional lives," said Holly, and it sounded like the beginning of a spiel. "But... well, they're not complicated. They're very much just... there."

"Versus gods?"

"You're part god yourself,” said Holly. "Wouldn't you know?"

"I'm not part god," said Suzy, beginning on a different part, pulling the waist in. 

"You're not exactly human either," said Holly.

"If I've learned anything," Suzy said, "it's that ‘not human’ doesn't necessarily mean ‘god.’"

"You could be a demigod."

"Wouldn't I have to be descended from a god for that?"

"In the old days, maybe," said Holly.

"Were there a lot of demigods running around, in the old days?"

Holly shrugged. She was chewing on a nugget of gold, nibbling it slowly like a piece of taffy.

Suzy had read about taffy in a book, and then she'd worked over the stove to make it, twisting it again and again in all four hands. 

She'd never had so much access to things like sugar before. It all tasted different, but like hell if she wasn't going to at least try it. 

"We didn't know the signs, back then."

"Are there that many signs?"

"Well, I can tell you that we didn't have that many people who looked like you."

Suzy flared her wings out, so that the two of them were almost completely covered.

She had more today, and some of them passed over or through others, because... well, she'd learned the word "non-Euclidean", and that seemed to suit her wings.

It suited a lot of things around here, honestly.

Space did things that space... didn't normally do.

Or at least, she didn't _think_ it normally did.

She had dreams sometimes, of vast, bustling cities, filled with people wearing odd clothes. Sometimes they weren't people to begin with, they were... well, no.

They weren't people shaped, the way Suzy was used to it. 

But she wasn't really "people shaped" either, compared to the people she grew up with.

But if they built cities, they were probably people.

She saw... she saw so much. She saw other places, other worlds, and some of them didn't follow the rules that she was used to. 

"So you didn't know about gods."

"Some people think that we came around in the first place because of belief," said Holly, and she sounded thoughtful.

"Yeah?"

"Well, there was a thought that belief was what made gods. If enough of of us believed in a thing enough, it would become true."

"You said ‘us’ as in mortals, but you also said ‘us’ as in gods," said Suzy.

"Did I?"

"You did," said Suzy.

Holly smiled, and it was a sad smile.

"I guess some part of me still misses it."

"Misses it?"

"Misses... being a person."

Holly pulled on the gold, and it stretched and stretched, wobbling between her fingers, as her teeth sank into it.

"I mean," said Suzy, "I think you're still a person."

"Why?"

Suzy blinked, paused, tried to get her thoughts in order.

How to explain... well, that?

"Well," Suzy began, "I... I have feelings for you."

And the god dropped the gold, which made a hollow ‘thunk’ on the table.

"You do?"

Holly was blushing, and her voice had gone up an octave.

"I live with you," Suzy pointed out, and she focused on the row that she was stitching."I couldn't exactly live with you and not have feelings of any kind for you. We inhabit a space together."

_You took me away from my family, and you rescued my brain when it was burning alive,_ remained unsaid, on the very tip of her tongue. _I kiss you sometimes, and it feels like I'm alive again, but you still taste like metal and dirt._

"Well," said Holly, and she cleared her throat, picking up the gold again.

"What does that taste like?" Suzy indicated the gold, more to change the subject than because she actually cared.

"It tastes... like itself," said Holly. "I can taste the separate things that make it... itself."

"What do they taste like, individually?"

"Like the color yellow," said Holly, "but shinier."

Suzy blinked at her.

Colors didn't have tastes, as far as she was aware.

"Have you tried eating anything that's not... traditionally food?"

"What do you mean?"

Holly shrugged. "I'm honestly a bit surprised you haven't tried to eat the books," she said. 

"Why would I eat the books?"

Books were a precious commodity, not a thing that you ate!

... although she was sitting across from someone who was literally snacking on a precious metal, so was there really any space for her to judge?

Maybe she was overthinking this a bit.

"Some people thought – think – that you can get knowledge by eating it."

"What, like... if I ate a book I'd just _know_ things?"

"Something like that," said Holly. "I know it works that way for minotaurs." Her expression turned wistful for a moment.

"Minotaurs?"

"They're a kind of monster," said Holly. "The original one was half man, half bull."

"How did _that_ happen?"

Suzy had seen bulls.

That... that didn't seem workable.

"Well," said Holly, "in the story, this one king angered the god of the sea, so the god of the sea cursed his wife to fall in love with a bull."

"Oh," said Suzy.

That did sound like the kind of thing a god would do.

"And then she went to a man, who built her a... contraption, so that she could... consummate the love, and, well... then she had a baby."

Holly was blushing very hard. 

“Oh,” said Suzy.

She knew how all of that happened, obviously. She was more than old enough, and she’d worked with animals.

“Well, the child that came from that union was a monster that was half bull, half human, and it was hungry for human flesh. So its father, the king, built a great labyrinth and hid it in the middle.”

“What’s a labyrinth?”

“A big, fancy maze.”

“A maze?”

“It’s… a thing to get lost in.”

“What, on purpose?”

“Yeah.”

“... huh.”

It was always weird, when Holly talked about before. 

Why would people want to get lost on purpose?

“Well, regardless, we now have a few minotaurs wandering around.”

“Where?” 

“Here and there,” said Holly. “I… I don’t know if you’d be safe. Probably, since you’re not human anymore.”

“Why do they eat people?”

“It’s complicated,” said Holly. 

Suzy made a face. “Is that your answer to everything?”

Holly made a face right back to her, and then she grinned, her nose wrinkling up.

Suzy smiled back with her eyes – _all_ of her eyes, as her wings flared out behind her like some massive cape. 

“It’s not my fault that so many things are complicated,” said Holly. “But… I’ve got a few theories.”

“What are your theories?”

“I know that minotaurs learn things by eating them,” said Holly. “I’ve seen them gain knowledge from devouring books.”

That sounded like the utmost profanity to Suzy, but then again, she was very attached to her books. 

“So I think… I think they want to remember what it’s like to be a person. And part of remembering what it’s like to be a person involves stuff like… well, eating a person.”

Suzy wanted to ask how someone could forget to be a person, but, well….

Her second set of arms already felt as natural as if she’d been born with them, and the eyes on her wings… well, it was her.

If she tried to reject the wings, she might go crazier than she already was.

Was she crazy?

Who fucking knew?

Suzy sighed, a long, deep sound. 

“Is something wrong?”

Holly was pulling on more gold.

“How do you know if you’re going crazy or not?”

Suzy leaned back, looking down at her dress. The beatles caught the light, and they sparkled like jewels.

“What do you mean?”

“Like… what’s a sign that you’re losing your mind. That you’re going crazy?”

Holly shrugged, her expression uncomfortable. She had eaten the last of the gold.

“I don’t know anymore,” Holly said, and there was an almost bitter cast to her features. “I… I wasn’t as sane as other people, back in the old days.”

“No?”

Holly shrugged. “People… people are at least partially made out of chemicals,” she said. “And if bad stuff happens to you, the chemicals can do things to you.”

Suzy nodded. “What kind of bad things?”

“Bad ones,” Holly said shortly.

There was an awkward silence, so uncomfortable that Suzy was _this_ close to gnawing her own limbs off.

“Are you worried about losing your mind?”

Holly’s tone was… downright inquisitive.

“I’m… I don’t know,” Suzy said. 

“I think part of it is because, you know, you’ve… you’ve changed.”

Suzy nodded, although she wasn’t sure she followed.

“And people need people like them, but there aren’t any people like you, are there?”

“Not really, no,” said Suzy. “Unless I met some other angels, I suppose.”

“You’re not… really an angel,” said Holly. 

“No?”

“I mean,” said Holly, “you’re… partially an angel. But you’re other things too.” 

“Other things,” Suzy said, her voice flat. 

“You’ve got some mortal, obviously, since you’re still mostly… yourself. But you’ve also got all that knowledge. And there’s whatever other things you’ve gotten from living here.”

“Living here could change me?”

Suzy hadn’t even thought of that. 

“Too much exposure to divinity can… you know, change you. And when someone is… like you, they’re very mutable.” 

“Mutable?”

She could be silenced?

“Changeable,” said Holly. 

“I’d notice if I was changing, wouldn’t I?”

Suzy flared her wings out, flapped them a few times. It sent a gust of air through the great room, rustling a few pinned papers.

Another flood of information washed over her – _my beloved is mine as I am his; he feedeth among the lilies_ – and then she was coming back to herself, shaking her head. 

Holly shot her a worried look. “Are you alright?”

“Could someone eat lilies?”

… that was a random question, but it helped to replace the things in her head sometimes, to find out what it was that she was getting pieces of. 

She smoothed her hands across the beetle printed fabric. 

They were beginning to develop new calluses – not just the ones from working at her parent’s farm, but from all the cooking and painting and sewing. 

“I know that lilies are dangerous to cats,” said Holly. “They’re probably dangerous to humans, too.”

“Right,” said Suzy.

She tried to remember what color her parent’s dog was.

… she couldn’t.

Maybe Holly hadn’t done anything with her after all. Maybe the transformation into an angel was happening, just… slower than usual.

“Suzy,” Holly said, and her voice was sharp, “you need to calm down.”

“Hm?”

“You’re… boiling the rock,” Holly said. 

“Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t… oh.”

Suzy looked down at her own feet, and the way the rock was… well, boiling. 

Who knew that was a thing that could happen?

She tried to quiet herself down, tried to get her feelings to stop roiling so much.

She took deep breaths, and the rock cooled.

It was shiny and black – obsidian, that was that was called.

"I miss being myself," Suzy said.

Miraculously, the beetle dress wasn't damaged in the slightest. 

"I'm sorry," said Holly. "We can try to figure out who you are now."

"I feel like I'm losing myself," said Suzy, "when I'm under here."

"Do you want to go back up?"

Holly's face looked very… sad.

Huh.

"Yes," said Suzy. "I miss the sky."

"If you go back up... you might not be able to come back," said Holly. "I don't know all the rules."

"Wasn't Persephone able to go back and forth?"

"Sort of," said Holly. "It was partially because of her mother, Demeter."

"And my mother isn't Demeter."

What was her mother's name?

... she wanted to remember. 

She could just barely make out her mother's face.

"No," Holly agreed.

"So I might be stuck up there? Without anything?"

"Well, I mean, you'd have your own power," said Holly. "But you wouldn't have my library. Or... well, me."

"Right," said Suzy. 

What would it be like, not having Holly around?

Suzy associated Holly with... well, all of this.

She'd had Holly around since she'd first become whatever it was she was now.

"Can you create things out of nothing?"

"Sort of," said Holly. "It's complicated."

" _Everything_ is complicated," Suzy said. "Tell me how it's complicated."

"It's... there is a limited amount of... _stuff_ in the world," said Holly. 

"Stuff?"

Holly made vague hand motions. "Stuff to... make stuff."

Suzy crossed both sets of arms, the dress still draped across her lap.

"It's kind of... okay. So everything is made of atoms and energy and whatnot, right?"

"Right."

"So I can take the atoms and the energy from one thing to make another, but I have to _take_ it. I can't just conjure it out of nowhere."

"So why do plants grow when you're above ground?"

"I kind of... accelerate things," said Holly. "So things are going a little faster than they would ordinarily."

"Accelerate?"

"If I'm standing on a patch of ground that has seeds on it, the seeds are going to sprout as if it's been an elapsed period of time, instead of a short one."

"Oh," said Suzy. 

"I'm not really... making something from nothing. I'm just changing something."

"Can you show me you... creating something?"

"What kind of something?"

"A flower," Suzy said. 

She missed flowers.

"Is that what you really want?"

Holly's face looked... weirdly sad.

"Yeah," said Suzy. "I'd like a flower."

"What kind of flower?"

"A white one," said Suzy. 

And then Holly was frowning down at her own hands, which were now resting on the table top.

There was a white flower there.

There hadn't been a "before" and "after" moment – it hadn't faded into view, or anything like that.

It had just... happened.

Huh.

Holly presented it to Suzy. 

"What is it?"

"It's a lily," said Holly, her voice was quiet.

"Oh," said Suzy.

The stem was still seeping green, and she rubbed the juices between her fingers, then smelled them, her eyes sliding shut. 

The flower smelled a little bit like it had been in the sun.

She hadn't realized how badly she missed that. 

She pressed her face into the flower's petals, and found them... almost musty.

She'd smelled lilies a few times, but she'd never realized what they had that scent. Usually, she was smelling the scent of the water around her, the slightly rotted mud.

She sighed, and then she looked up at Holly.

"Thank you," Suzy said, her voice very soft.

Holly smiled at her. 

"I'd do almost anything for you," she told Suzy, and there was a degree of sincerity that was... well, honestly, it was a little scary.

Having someone looking at you like that seemed to be full of promises.

Let alone a god.

Suzy sighed, and she tucked the lily behind her ear.

Then she went back to her sewing.

"I think I'm going to make bread next," she told Holly.

"What kind of bread?"

"Sourdough. My mother tried to bake it a few times, but she always had trouble with it."

"I don't know if there's enough natural yeast around here, honestly."

"Well," said Suzy, "I can always try." 

* * * 

Suzy made bread.

The first batch of it was horrible. 

It never rose – Suzy pummeled it with all four fists, and she kneaded it until her arms were sore, but it stayed a wet, blobby mess on the bottom of the bowl.

Holly, at least, made sympathetic noises.

Bread was… well, bread took a lot of attempts.

Suzy ended up reading up on bread, on its history, on the theories behind it, on its origins... she hadn't known there was so much to know about bread, honestly.

It was one of those things that was just... there.

Except it wasn't, in this place.

Oh, Holly could magic up bread out of nowhere, but that was... different. 

Living underground was beginning to get to Suzy – things were just _there_. 

She wanted to start a garden.

She wanted to... she wanted to make something with her hands.

She wanted to keep baking bread, until it was completely perfect.

Her first successful loaf was... well, it was ugly, but it was bread.

It didn't have enough of a bite, and she frowned, staring down at it. 

"Is something wrong?"

Holly was looking at her with a slightly worried expression.

"I could have done it better," Suzy told her.

"What's wrong with it?"

"It needs... something," said Suzy. 

"Well," said Holly, "as I've said, anything you could possibly need is here."

"I miss the sun," Suzy said, and that was unexpected, because she wasn't usually someone who liked the sun. 

... maybe it was only possible to want something when you didn't have it anymore.

Wow, that was trite, wasn't it?

She made an annoyed face at herself, and took another bite of her mediocre bread.

"I'm sorry you miss the sun," said Holly. 

Her face was very sad.

"Do you?"

"Do I miss the sun?"

Holly was eating the bread as well, even though she apparently didn't need to.

Maybe she was doing it for the company.

Having one's bread being eaten out of sympathy was probably vaguely insulting, but... fuck it. 

"Somewhat, yeah," said Holly. "Truth be told, I actually preferred rainy weather. Back in the day, I mean."

"Yeah? Why?"

"Where I lived was very dry, and we didn't get rain much. It felt nice. And I loved the smell of the rain on the ground."

"Petrichor," said Suzy. The word came to her out of nowhere.

Holly smiled, a wide, pleased grin.

"Yes," she said. 

"I'm going to bake more bread," Suzy said, standing up.

Her shirt, an old canvas thing she'd found in the back of a closet,- was stained with flour, and it was under the fingernails of all four hands. 

"What, already?"

"Why not?"

"I guess," Holly said, although she looked skeptical. "Can I help?"

"How are you at measuring?"

"I'm pretty good," Holly said. "I liked to cook, back then. I still cook sometimes."

"Right," said Suzy, and then she was rubbing all her hands together, and gathering ingredients.

* * *

She mastered a peasant loaf, like the one her father used to make, after five attempts.

She stood in the kitchen, pressing her face into the brown crust, and she was in her parent’s kitchen, the sunlight streaming through a window. 

And then… then she was underground again, flour on her cheek, all four hands full of bread.

The crust crackled under her hands, as her knuckles went white.

She left the loaves on the counter, and she went to the library.

Sourdough took longer – it took her ten attempts, but by the time she'd done it, she'd done it.

Her parents had mentioned sourdough. Apparently, her grandfather had been very fond of it, but had never been able to master it.

She read about the origins of it, about the special kind that came from a city named after a saint. 

And she made the starter, again and again, until it was finally musty smelling and bubbling, as full of strange life as any fungus. 

When she’d perfected it, she bit into the white insides, the crust crunching between her back teeth. There were tears dripping down her face, clattering down on the floor, so many shards of smokey quartz.

Then came the breads she read about in all of the books: challah, stollen, anpan. Breads she’d never heard of, with ingredients she couldn’t even fathom.

But she made them. 

She cut up raisins and mixed in honey from the hives of the dead.

Bees were special, according to Holly – Suzy didn’t know all the details, but the honey they made felt a bit like sorrow in the back of her throat, and a bit like the first shades of sunrise.

She baked bread, to remember what it was like to be a person. 

She pursued it with a level of single-minded determination she didn't know she had, except that if she didn't stop working, something bad was going to happen.

What was going to happen?

Who the fuck knew?

She pounded dough, she kneaded it, she braided it, and she tried to block out the cold, damp scent of the underground with rising dough, egg washes, raisins and cinnamon and candied fruit.

It wasn't enough.

It was nowhere near enough, and one night, her arms aching, her head pounding, she just... sat down in the kitchen, wrapping herself in her wings and in her arms, and she cried.

Holly was there, all of a sudden – the god tended to drift in and out of the kitchen, sampling this or suggesting that.

She sat on the floor next to Suzy, and she opened her own arms up.

And for the first time... Suzy pushed her away.

Suzy pushed Holly away, with all four limbs, with the power that was residing in her head, converted from all of that knowledge.

Holly looked at her, confused.

"I want to go home," Suzy said, and her voice cracked. Her wings were flaring out, and the rage inside of her was getting brighter, brighter, filling her whole _self_ up. 

And Holly was looking at her, and she looked sad.

Really sad.

And that was making Suzy angrier.

Huh.

She hadn't been this angry since she'd only had two arms.

Since she had been human.

"I want to go home," Suzy said again, and there were many voices in her own this time.

She contained multitudes.

She had never realized that. 

"Your home might not be the same," said Holly, but now she was... now she was standing up, and Suzy's vision was filled with the god.

This was the god; this was the Lady of the Underground, not sweet Holly. 

Suzy refused to back down. She stared the god in the face, as her wings spread behind her, her many eyes blinking out at the world, seeing through her clothes, through everything.

"I don't care. I want to go back."

"I can't go with you. I need to keep things in balance."

And then Suzy was kissing the god again, like it was the end of the world.

It _was_ the end of the world, wasn't it?

It had been the end of the world for a very long time. 

"I love you," Holly whispered, her lips soft and dry against Suzy's.

"I love you," Suzy echoed, "but I can't love you more than I love the sky."

She didn't know where that came from – she didn't know where any of this desperate longing was coming from, except that if she stayed underground much longer, she was going to die. 

Could she die, as a god?

If she died, would she be here, surrounded by the floating lights of the dead, just one more flickering point of brightness?

The uncertainty of it all crashed down on her head, like a kind of wave, and she wanted to scream. She wanted to pull her own hair, to cry, to.... something. 

She wanted to be somewhere else. 

Somewhere… safe. 

Somewhere that was her home.

“Who am I?” Suzy’s voice cracked. 

She turned her wings on… herself, spreading them, trying to see _herself_ the way she saw everything else.

The same way she saw Holly,

And what did she see?

She didn’t know.

She wanted… she wanted more of something, she _needed_ more of something.

She could bury herself in flour and yeast, in sewing, painting, in articulating skeletons and reading books.

She could stay down here, until the last of her mind succumbed to the rot and mold that came about in any dark place.

And she loved Holly. 

How about that?

She was in love.

And it wasn’t enough.

Wasn’t love supposed to be enough?

“I want to go home,” Suzy said. 

“This could be your home,” said Holly.

“It’s not,” said Suzy.

Holly gave a long, low sigh. “You’re really unhappy, aren’t?”

Suzy nodded.

Holly had mercury streaming down her face, but she was… she was doing _something._

Suzy didn’t know, except there was a hole in the air, and there was light coming out of it.

Real light. Sunlight.

“I can’t go with you,” Holly said.

“Not even for a night? For a few hours?” Suzy pleaded.

She didn’t want to leave.

She didn’t – she wanted to be with Holly, and she wanted to be above ground.

Why couldn’t Holly be some lady from the valley who kept pigeons? Suzy could bake bread, and they could build a house together, they could live in the sun, away from gods, away from the dead….

But that wasn’t an option, was it?

She looked at Holly, and the god gave her a nervous smile, metal teeth flashing, the quicksilver dripping down her chin.

“Take care of yourself,” said Holly, and then she stepped back.

And Suzy stepped through the hole in the air, because… what else was she going to do?

She stood there, and then she was looking over her shoulder to see Holly’s face. Her last view of the underworld was the way the corpselight caught the mercury.

And there was Suzy, standing in the middle of a forest. 

Oh. 

It was… it was pretty.

It was green.

She hadn’t realized how badly she’d missed green - the moss was soft under her feet, and then she was… she was sitting down on the moss, and she was looking up at the sky, through the leaves.

There were circular shadows passing over her face, and it was… it was the kind of thing she’d needed.

She smelled things growing, and she hadn’t been able to smell that before.

She could see, with eyes all over – her wings, her arms, her legs.

… she was still in her baking clothes, and she still smelled like yeast and flour. 

She was going to see her family again, for the first time in who knew how long, and now she was covered in flour. 

Oh well.

But now she was… fuck, now she was watching the sky. 

She watched the clouds, and she might have been able to see the history, the future, all of the little details.

If she wanted, she could count the atoms.

She didn’t fucking care about any of that. She just wanted to stay and watch the sky.

* * *

She stayed under the trees for… at least three days, watching it all.

It was all so _beautiful_. How had she never paid any attention to it, when she’d lived here all the time?

The moss under her had burned, and there was a pang of guilt at that – it wasn’t the fault of the moss that she burned it. She had just been there, and so had the moss. 

Hopefully, it would grow back stronger.

* * * 

Suzy walked through the land, as the sun passed over her shoulders. 

She left burning, glassy footsteps behind her as she walked. Maybe she should have put shoes on.

But she hadn’t planned this, had she?

She stood in the middle of a field of color-changing flowers – this must have been some kind of magical fallout.

When she spread her wings, her mind was flooded, and she… rode the wave, let the wave crest over her, and then she was… filled with knowledge.

There had been a city here.

A city full of lights, different from the corpselight, different from anything she’d seen before. 

Her eyes were full of light – _all_ of her eyes. 

And… something happened. 

There was a bright flash of light, and of color, and then things had changed.

Suzy blinked the light out of her eyes, and she began to walk again. 

* * *

It was hot – she was sweating, sort of.

She had forgotten about heat. The coldness of the underworld had been creeping under her skin, and she hadn’t been… bothered by it, but now she wasn’t experiencing it. 

The sun was bright and the rain was wet, and she walked, and she learned about the world.

She hadn’t realized how much she didn’t know.

There was… there was more _to_ know than she’d ever realized.

You never knew what you didn’t know.

… wow, that sounded dumb.

She was walking through an empty town when the thought popped into her head, and she had to stop and just… laugh, throwing her head back and laughing at the clouds.

The clouds gave a crack of thunder, and they seemed to be laughing back at her, and she spread her wings, looking up at the sky.

She caught a glimpse – only a glimpse – of a long, gangly man, his curly, frizzy hair a mess of electricity, eyes as open as the sky at night. 

He grinned at her and gave her a thumbs up with a ridiculously huge thumb, and then a sheet of water fell down on her, as welcome as a hug. 

… Suzy missed Holly. 

She missed the god so hard that it was almost painful.

She was sobbing, and the crystals tinkled down her face, as she sat down in the middle of the empty street.

Only to… be beside the gangly man.

Um.

“Hi,” he said, and there was the howl of wind and music behind his voice. 

“Hi,” said Suzy. 

“Are you new at this?” His tone was gentle. 

He was wearing jeans, and a t-shirt that said “Rush”. Why would someone want to wear a shirt that just had a word on it? 

Then the knowledge hit her as her eyes saw it, and she knew the whole story – the lightning struck him mid-song, mid-step, mid-breath, the music of the wind and the rain and the thunder drumming through his veins, the rainbows and the snow following him like a friendly dog. 

“You’re very old,” she said, staring at him.

“Yep,” he said, and he looked rueful. “Older than most folks.”

His skin was… the color changed, even if the texture was the same. 

And he smiled at her, his teeth like sheets of lightning, his eyes as ever changing as the clouds. 

“You’re not that old, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I was born… somewhere around here.”

She stood up, beginning to walk again. 

“So was I,” he said. He walked besides her, hands in his pockets, leaving wet footprints in the already damp dirt. 

“Yeah?” 

Suzy was still cooking the ground behind her, and she could see their footprints matched up against each other, burnt and wet. Things already beginning to grow out of his – wet, soggy things, like moss. 

“A very long time ago,” he said. “Before… you know.” 

He made a vague hand motion. “All of this.”

“Right,” she said, although she wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “I’m trying to find my home.”

“Where was your home?”

“I was… I was living underground, for a while. With the Lady.”

The storm god’s expression got soft, and he combed his fingers through his hair. It sent up a chattering spray of sparks, as the thunder boomed overhead again. 

“She’s good people,” said the storm god. 

“Yeah,” Suzy agreed. “But I missed the sky.” 

“I miss the land sometimes,” said the storm god. “But I can come down occasionally. Thanks for keeping me company while I did.”

And then… he was gone. 

The air smelled like petrichor. 

Her step was lighter, as she made her way towards the forest. 

* * * 

Suzy met an angel, when she was walking on a long, wide road. 

There was the skeleton of some great, rusted iron thing – maybe it had been a living monster, or a giant machine, before the world had moved on. 

And then there was someone walking next to her.

“You know, you were one of us,” said the angel, but their - his? - voice changed, with each word.

“Was?”

The angel was covered in mouths, the way she was covered in eyes, except for on his face. 

“You’re not really one of us anymore,” he said. “You could’ve been, though.”

He was wearing a pair of floppy pants, and a shirt that showed off his arms.

He only had two arms, versus her four, and they were covered in mouths.

That was unsettling.

And he had a beard on his face, which was a bit weird, since there was no mouth in the middle of it. 

“Yeah?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. 

“Why?” 

“Because someone else… I dunno, claimed you.”

Each word was a different voice. 

Their bare feet slapped across the great road. 

“Claimed?”

“Not exactly. But they took you… elsewhere. Beyond where we are.”

“Beyond?”

“Yeah. We – or I guess… well, the “we” that doesn’t have anything to do with you,” he said. 

Some of the voices were silly, some were sad. Some of them felt real. 

And his eyes were very brown, as they met the pair that were in her hair, that were in her wings, her arms, her chest, her shoulders, her everything. 

“We might’ve been a pair,” he said. 

Her heart was beating a little faster. “A pair?”

They walked in step, and some small part of her longed for that, for the rest of her life.

Their footsteps melted the rock, exactly in the shape of their feet.

She looked at him, and she saw… bits of it, of his story, who he had been.

He had lived farther away, when her parents had been kids. He’d been able to sing like a bird, and then the same knowledge that had hit her hit him… but differently. 

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“What made us?”

He stopped walking, looking thoughtful, and then he shrugged. “I have no idea. There was… maybe a god or something, or maybe we answer to some higher up, but it’s not anyone I’ve ever known.”

“So how do you know what to do?”

“I just do.” 

“That’s not very helpful,” she said, and she tried not to sound too accusing.

“Can’t all be winners,” he said, and he smiled at her, from all those mouths. 

It was a bit bone chilling. 

… did she even have bones anymore?

What did she know about herself anymore?

“Can I ask a weird question?”

“Sure,” said the angel. 

“Do we have bones?”

And then the angel laughed, laughed with so many voices that her whole body shuddered, and she wrapped both sets of arms around herself, holding on to her shoulders and her hips. 

“I think so, yeah,” said the angel. “Then again… who fucking knows? We’re technically beings of the divine made flesh.”

“Divine… what?”

He shrugged, and his wings rustled with it. 

“I have no idea,” he said. “But you’re not one of us anymore. Enjoy your chance to be… whoever you are.”

“Do you not want to be an angel?”

“I don’t… _not_ want to be one,” he said. “But I don’t know how to be anything else, either.”

“Right,” said Suzy. 

He patted her on the shoulder, and then she was walking entirely by herself.

… huh.

That was weird. 

So she wasn’t an angel, like she’d thought. 

Or maybe she was… more than an angel.

Something to chew over, metaphorically. 

* * *

Suzy didn’t run into many humans. 

They probably saw her coming from a distance – she had quite the silhouette these days, what with one thing and another. 

Her wings were spread wide to help her keep her balance, and she could feel the eyes on her when she passed by some houses that had been boarded up.

Her family had always been too far removed to be passed by gods, apart from the wanderers. 

She’d never realized that before.

She tried not to look at people, if she could help it.

She didn’t want to… infect them. 

* * *

The air smelled like her family when she met the tree sprite.

She hadn’t realized that she could know the smell of her family. znut she’d been walking for… two months, maybe, she’d lost track, and then the smell of her family hit her.

She didn’t know how she knew, but she cut across a whole field of sunflowers, following the feeling of home.

She burned a swathe through the flowers, and then she was walking through the woods, and she _knew_ these woods. They were her home.

Her heart beat very loudly in her ears, and every step seemed to do things to the ground - it wasn’t just leaving burnt footprints. 

Were there things… growing, behind her?

She could see the future, and in that future, she could see the sunflowers growing large and strange, with precious stones dripping from it like pollen.

Huh.

“That’s gonna make shit weird.”

Suzy turned, on the treeline, and saw… a strange looking man. 

He was green, and there was something… bendable about him, like a sunflower stalk. 

His hair was made of flower petals, and his eyes were the bright blue of forget-me-nots.

She’d never seen a forget-me-not, but the simile sprung to mind. 

“Sorry about that,” said Suzy, because what else was she going to say?

“Eh,” he said, “it happens. What are you?”

“I’m… not sure,” said Suzy, which was true. “Are there people around here? I can smell them.”

“What kind of people?”

“What do you mean, what kind of people?”

“Human, angel, god, monster….”

She shrugged.

“Oh,” said… whoever he was, and he shrugged. “They come to stay in the fields. There was a thing that happened here a long time ago, and things changed.”

“Changed?”

“Apparently, you go crazy if you sleep in the field, but it’s a special kind of crazy.”

“Huh,” said Suzy. 

She stood there, one set of hands in her pockets, one set crossed across her chest.

“That may bring some interesting things in, though.”

“Interesting?” 

“Can’t you see the future with those things?” He indicated her wings. 

She snorted. “How’d you know that?”

“I have a million eyes that I can see all with,” he said, as if that was a thing.

With the eyes in her wings, she saw the many sunflowers slowly gain blue centers, then turn back to their regular color.

… um.

“Oh,” was all she said.

“It doesn’t really make sense,” he said, and he grinned at her. “But eh.”

He had a young face, but the expression was very, very old. 

“You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I remember when these were all video cameras,” he said. 

She frowned, and then the knowledge dropped into her head. 

“Oh,” she said again.

Video cameras which somehow became sunflowers, and in their changing, changing him. 

He grinned at her, and he waggled his eyebrows. 

“You have fun,” he told her. “What with one thing and another, we’re almost like cousins.”

And then he was turning into a flower, and there was a great, bobbing sunflower above them all, with a pair of bright blue eyes staring down at her.

… huh.

This was all going very strangely.

She didn’t know what was normal.

She didn’t know what was abnormal either, come to think of it. 

She walked into the forest. 

* * *

She found the tree that Holly had planted, the holly tree with its red berries, and the tree that had been changed. 

The pigeons were nesting again – a different set of pigeons, it seemed. 

Suzy looked up at the holly tree, which now towered over her. 

She put a hand on the bark, and she closed her eyes, and she could see the god – she could see Holly, and it made her heart ache. 

She wanted to go back.

But how?

She pressed a kiss to the bark of the tree, and a few of the spiky leaves rested in her hair. 

She ran her fingers over it, and the flat of the leaf was shiny, almost waxy against her thumb. 

Okay. 

She could do this.

She let her memory turn her towards home, and she walked.

* * *

The house was empty. 

It had been empty for some time now, years and years.

There was a sapling, tall enough that its leave brushed the lintel, and the door was open.

She had to draw her wings in close, as she stepped in, but… here was her family’s home.

Her family’s home, empty of furniture, empty of people.

They had left.

They had left… a long time ago.

She sighed, walking slowly through the rooms. 

The articulated pigeon was still at the windowsill - her sister hadn’t taken it with her when they’d gone. She wasn’t sure if she was sad or exasperated; she’d worked hard on that.

She climbed onto the roof, and she stared at the sky, where the moon had come out in the dimness. 

She could see the stars, and the burnt spot where she had changed, and she leaned back on the roof, wrapping her wings around herself. 

It was beautiful - it was as familiar as an old pair of pants, washed and darned, let in, let out… 

It was beautiful, but it wasn’t her home. 

What was she going to do?

She sat on the roof, and up in the sky, the moon rose. 

She knew that moon. 

She sighed, looking at it with all of her eyes, even the ones covered by clothing.

She climbed down – _jumped_ down, leaving a small crater in the ground – and then she was walking back to the trees.

As she walked, her feet disturbed a little pile of stones. 

She paused, looking down at them, and picked one up.

Smoky quartz.

She held her own grief in her hand, and then her fingers went to the ruby around her throat, and she squeezed it, gently. 

She made her way towards the trees, until she was under the holly tree again, looking at the moon through its branches.

She closed her eyes, resting the crown of her head against the bark of the tree.

Her heart was beating in her ears, and she was sighing, her breath filling her lungs.

Did she even need to breathe?

But the night… it smelled almost sweet, familiar and foreign.

Something caught in her throat, and she cried, great, gasping sobs, the smokey quartz tinkling down her face to pile on the ground. 

She tugged on the ruby, snapping the necklace, and held it in her hand – a handful of smokey quartz, a handful of ruby. 

Seized by some random urge – who was she to doubt it, when the moon was full and her home was empty and strange? – she dug a small hole. 

She buried the ruby and the quartz carefully, and then she leaned back again and closed her eyes.

_All_ of her eyes, from the tips of her wings to the insides of her legs. 

And she slept. 

* * *

Suzy woke up curled up between two trees.

There was the holly tree, and there was… another.

It was red, and it had great, red fruits.

Pomegranates. 

Oh.

Suzy’s heart was beating in her ears, as she reached up to take a pomegranate, and then she knew how to eat it. 

Was she going to?

She sat on the ground, and she looked at it for a very long time. 

And then she needed a knife, which… took some time. She found one in her parents’ house, hidden in a drawer, and then she was carefully cutting open the pomegranate, following a guide she’d read in a book, separating the pith from the seeds.

The seeds looked like rubies. 

She already missed the familiar weight of the ruby around her neck. 

If she ever saw Holly again, she’d have to ask for another one.

... if that wouldn’t be rude.

Was there a polite way to do that? “Sorry I abandoned you, please give me more precious jewels.”

She sighed, and she ate six seeds, a handful, that stained her fingers a deep, dark red.

It was a burst of red, the richness of it filling his whole mind up. 

Oh. 

Oh, that was lovely. 

It tasted like home, and it settled… whatever tumult had been raging in her since she’d changed.

And now… now, here she was, in the empty house, her feet burning marks into the floor.

And then Holly was standing there – just standing there, looking confused. 

There was flour on her hands, and she was looking into Suzy’s face.

“Why am I here?”

Suzy held out a bit of the pomegranate, and Holly lipped it out of her fingers, taking in the taste, her whole body… changing, relaxing. 

“Oh,” said Holly, her voice thick. 

“I missed you,” said Suzy. 

“I missed you too,” said Holly. “So much.”

She was crying, and there was mercury sliding down her face. The two of them pressed closer, clinging to each other, and they were kissing, tears mingling, and there was mercury slick smokey quartz raining down on the floor.

“I can’t… I can’t stay there forever,” said Suzy. “I miss the sky too much. But… I can go back and forth. I think. I think I know how.”

Did she?

She had… she had ideas, ideas about seasons, ideas about rules, ideas about… magic, and the workings of magic. 

“You think?”

Holly opened a hole in the air, right there in the empty house. 

“I think so,” said Suzy. “But for now… let’s go home.”

And the two gods took each other’s hands, and they walked into the hole in the air.

**Author's Note:**

> The absolutely _wonderful_ stillnotomnipotent did some fucking amazing art of it, of one of the best scenes!
> 
> http://a-d-a-a-r.tumblr.com/post/176428296581/she-turned-her-face-to-the-sky-and-in-the-heavens


End file.
